Today’s big news is that Coursera, the largest of the MOOC providers, has signed with 10 public statewide systems. As described by Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed: Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup’s efforts to take online education to the masses. […]
MOOC
Harvard Faculty Request Faculty Oversight of HarvardX (Their Usage of edX)
Yesterday, 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard wrote an open letter to the dean requesting faculty oversight of HarvardX. When schools sign up for edX, their implementations tend to be called SchoolX, thus HarvardX specifically refers to their usage of the MOOC platform, not to the overall edX organization. […]
MOOCs Explained: Radio Interview with University of Delaware
Just over a week ago I had the opportunity to participate in a radio interview for the University of Delaware’s local station WVUD, with the Campus Voices interview airing on May 17th. The interview was in advance of Delaware’s summer faculty institute, where I will be speaking in just over a week. I really enjoyed the […]
Big 3 MOOC Providers Turning One Year Old
We are in the middle of the first anniversary of the creation of the big 3 MOOC providers (Coursera, Udacity, edX). Sebastian Thrun announced the creation of Udacity on January 23, 2012 as described by Reuters. Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng announced the creation of Coursera on April 18, 2012 in this NY Times article. […]
Open SUNY: A Game Changer in the Making
Update 4/25 and bumped due to changes: Thanks to Greg Ketcham and Robert Knipe, I have replaced the 2009 interim proposal document with the updated advisory team report. This changes the intro blurb, description of 9 inter-dependent components, and list of contributions below. I have been surprised at how little interest the Open SUNY announcement […]
Insight on MOOC student types from ELI Focus Session
Michael and I had the privilege of leading off the ELI Online Spring Focus Session on MOOCs (taking place today, Apr 3, and tomorrow). Thanks to Stephen Downes, we have a good set of notes on our presentation “Everything You Thought You Knew About MOOCs Could Be Wrong” (program & resources, notes) as well as the […]
SUNY and the Expansion of Prior Learning Assessments
Last week Steve Kolowich wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the State University of New York (SUNY) system approval of a plan that would target reduced time-to-degree. The State University of New York’s Board of Trustees on Tuesday endorsed an ambitious vision for how SUNY might use prior-learning assessment, competency-based programs, and massive open online […]