e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Udacity

  • MOOCs and Academic Exchanges Now Allowed for Iranian Students

    One development covered here at e-Literate this year has been the US State Department and Treasury Department forcing the MOOC providers to block access for students in Iran, Sudan, Cuba and Syria. Kris Olds has also provided excellent coverage as well as Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed. In late January Coursera had to start blocking students in these four countries while edX continued working with these students. Then in early March edX had to start blocking students in Iran, Sudan and Cuba.

    Today’s news is that OFAC has granted a General License G to allow academic exchanges such as MOOCs to operate within Iran.

    (more…)

  • edX forced to block access to students in Cuba, Iran and Sudan

    In late January I wrote here and here about the US Treasury Department, through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), blocking access to Coursera courses by students in Syria, Cuba, Iran and Sudan (also see Kris Olds article here and IHE article here). The reason for the decision appears to be that MOOCs were classified as educational services instead of informational materials. At the time, edX was permitted to operate in those countries based on their reliance on getting licenses approved by OFAC, whereas Coursera was relying on a broad interpretation by OFAC. edX president Anant Agarwal even posted on a blog a somewhat congratulatory note:

    At edX, we are pleased to announce that no one, in any country, is blocked from taking one of our courses, and we have never blocked students from receiving education on the edX platform because of where they live.

    EdX has worked for many months with the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets and Control (“OFAC”) and the U.S. State Department to determine how we can assure that no one in any country is blocked from taking an edX course.

    Now comes word that edX has been forced by OFAC to block access to several courses for students in Cuba, Iran and Sudan. From The Harvard Crimson late yesterday:

    (more…)

  • Coursera blocked in Iran due to human grading and discussion forums?

    Update: I just received confirmation from a Coursera spokesperson that the description of facts about Coursera’s block of student access in this and my previous blog post is accurate. They cannot comment on the rest of the professor’s statement nor on Udacity and edX.

    Yesterday I wrote about Coursera having to block access to its courses from students in Iran, Syria, Cuba and Sudan. Kris Olds covered this subject in more detail this morning as did Carl Straumsheim at Inside Higher Ed. The nub of the issue is that the US government (the State Department I believe) has declared MOOCs as educational services rather than information or informational materials, and thus the courses are subject to US embargoes of the four countries in question.

    According to IHE, Udacity “has not received official word about enrolling students in countries subject to economic sanctions”, and EdX has a license to operate in Iran, Syria and Cuba. So the issue is mostly with Coursera, although not by their decision.

    If a recent post from a Coursera instructor is accurate, we may now know what triggered the classification of MOOCs as a a service subject to sanctions. I was notified by a trusted reader that Ebrahim Afsah from the University of Copenhagen (yes, the same one from the story about abusive discussion forum posts) send a message this afternoon to all students in his MOOC “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” (registration required). He quotes a message from Coursera to MOOC instructors that includes the new information [emphasis added].

    (more…)

  • Coursera and Udacity, but not edX, blocked in Syria and Iran

    One of the most-cited aspects of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is their openness – anyone can access the courses with just Internet access and and email address. But this openness might not be valid in all countries based on recent actions.

    The media site Wamda, which focuses on supporting entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, has a story out today describing how Coursera and Udacity MOOCs have apparently been blocked in Syria and Iran [see update below on Syria].

    Just over six months ago, online education platform Coursera thanked a Syrian doctor for a poignant blog post that spoke directly to its mission to change the world by educating the masses. [snip]

    Yet today, Dr. Angrimi no longer has that lifeline, as Coursera appears to have blocked Syrian IPs since Friday.

    “Our system indicates that you are attempting to access the Coursera site from an IP address associated with a country currently subject to U.S. economic and trade sanctions. In order for Coursera to comply with U.S. export controls, we cannot allow you access to the site.”

    (more…)

  • Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina

    While it is well hidden, wrapped in a very careful press release, Phil’s sharp eye has caught the details in SJSU’s press release about the next phase in the Udacity pilot that suggest the partnership between the school and the company is winding down. When Carl Straumsheim of Inside Higher Ed asked an SJSU spokesperson point-blank whether Udacity would continue to be involved with the courses, the reply he got was “Good question for Udacity.”

    Ouch.

    The Schadenfreude surrounding Sebastian Thrun’s fall from grace has been intense ever since the Fast Company article quoted the man who the author labeled the “godfather of free online education” as saying that he realized he had a bad product, and noted that his company is “changing course” to focus on corporate training. Mike Caulfield captured the tone of the reaction in ed tech circles rather nicely when he wrote:

    Thrun can’t build a bucket that doesn’t leak, so he’s going to sell sieves….Udacity dithered for a bit on whether it would be accountable for student outcomes. Failures at San José State put an end to that. The move now is to return to the original idea: high failure rates and dropouts are features, not bugs, because they represent a way to thin pools of applicants for potential employers. Thrun is moving to an area where he is unaccountable, because accountability is hard.

    I imagine that it would be easy for somebody running or funding an ed tech startup to draw the wrong lessons from this sad story. Consider this blog post to be an open letter to my friends at ed tech startups with some advice about how to avoid the kind of disdain and ridicule that Thrun is receiving now.

    (more…)

  • SJSU and Udacity End Game: 3 courses to be offered for-credit on Canvas LMS

    After a great deal of publicity from their spring and summer pilots, San Jose State University has just announced that they will offer three of the courses again in Spring 2014 – but with a twist. On the surface, the announcement sounds like a continuation of the pilot.

    This spring, San Jose State will offer three online courses that were developed with Udacity to SJSU and California State University students.

    San Jose State students are registering now for Elementary Statistics, Introduction to Programming and General Psychology. In addition, the programming and statistics courses will be open to all CSU students through the CSU’s CourseMatch program.

    But after digging deeper, it really appears that this is an effort to separate without admitting failure or making either side look bad. There are some significant changes here:

    • Udacity is no longer being paid for the courses;
    • All the course content is free and open to SJSU and CSU faculty;
    • The for-credit course content will be on Udacity platform but faculty interactions and assessments will be run on SJSU’s official LMS (Canvas); and
    • SJSU will provide the teaching assistants.

    (more…)

  • MOOC history as presented at AACN13 conference

    With all of the great discussions spawned by the “greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs” (MRI13), it seems a good time to share a segment of a keynote presentation I gave last year on MOOC history. This presentation was at the American Association of the Colleges of Nursing (AACN) conference in April 2013. For context, I had just shared how online education was no longer an issue kept in the corner, away from mainstream higher ed, but was now affecting the traditional campus discussions.

    There is a relevant graphic that was shown during this segment of the talk, showing the MOOC timeline (updated version shown below).

    MOOCpreHistory20131202