San Jose State University (SJSU) and Udacity have announced the results of their summer pilot, and the headlines cover the big improvements (text from IHE article, table from Udacity blog). Thrun recently hinted that the summer pilot’s results would be more positive, and that Udacity was getting close to finding the “magic formula” to deliver […]
Udacity
You know what would help MOOC articles? Getting the facts and goals right before analyzing
Keith Devlin has an article at Huffington Post today titled “MOOC Mania Meets the Sober Reality of Education”. The premise is that the halting of the San Jose State University (SJSU) / Udacity pilot project and of SB 520 show that naive assumptions on the power of MOOCs to disrupt higher education are insufficient in […]
SJSU and Udacity: The Obvious Problems and Value of Report
SJSU has announced via an official blog post that they are studying the results of the SJSU Plus program using Udacity. First, news coverage and much commentary have been based on very preliminary and unanalyzed data from a spring 2013 pilot of three SJSU Plus courses with Udacity. We are currently awaiting a more comprehensive […]
SJSU and Udacity: Poor Planning and Support, but Valuable Reviewing of Results
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed for an article in the NY Times about recent pushback against MOOCs. Jonathan Rees, a history professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has written critically about MOOCs, said their spread is likely to lead to a three-tiered world, with a few high-status “super professors” for whom […]
MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context
One aspect of last week’s Coursera announcement was the acknowledgement that MOOCs to date have primarily served as a mechanism for professional development, not as a mechanism for serving higher education per se. In the Chronicle article: Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, acknowledged that the company was venturing into new terrain. After studying their MOOC […]
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. […]