The oer-community list is still buzzing about whether CC-NC is a good thing for openness or not. I thought I might ask a question that gives the conversation context and actually is a question that I am truly considering at this moment. Background I’ve been interested in hybrid MOOC/F2F designs for a long while. Initially Continue reading

Today, Slate republished a term paper assignment Kurt Vonnegut gave his students. Ds106ers and long-time cMOOCers will immediately note that his assignment style (assignments were were done as letters to his students) mimics elements of course blogging. Others will just be reminded of how much they miss his prose voice and the sort of sensitive Continue reading

Flickr: Gamma Man What is the Feed-forward xMOOC?  The Feed-forward xMOOC is a pretty simple concept. Take existing OER and OCW. Put it in an LMS framework, adding small quizzes, in-video questions, reading assignments, discussion questions, peer assessments. Set it up on a schedule, serialized week-to-week like an ordinary course. Then let people use it, for whatever they Continue reading

Although, I think we might start calling it “campus-based” online. In any case: A group of 10 highly selective colleges has formed a consortium to offer online courses that students enrolled at any of the campuses can take for credit. The group, which includes Wake Forest and Brandeis Universities, will offer semester-long online courses using Continue reading

From a Clay Shirky comment on his post on xMOOCs: The thing that seems to me to differentiate MOOCs from iTunes U and other ‘Access to the lecture’ platforms is the linking of the idea of a course that takes place at a certain time (including ending at a certain time), certification of the results, Continue reading

Talk about being misunderstood. The above worksheet, on which students were asked to assign certain activities to different genders, made the Facebook rounds recently, providing both liberals and teacher-bashers with their necessary Two Minutes Hate. Obviously, the worksheet is a poorly executed entry point into a discussion about the ridiculousness of many gender roles, and Continue reading

If believe that OER reuse could save education, and  you’re looking for a reason for your institution to NOT sign up with Coursera, I guess it’s this, from their terms of use: ““You may not take any Online Course offered by Coursera,” stipulate the terms, “or use any Letter of Completion as part of any tuition-based Continue reading

Daphne Koller, co-founder of Coursera, wrote an article in Forbes this week about the possibility of MOOC-wrapping and mixed models of online/traditional delivery that incorporate free globally offered online courses. I’m glad they are looking at this. I’ve been talking about this option quite a bit on this blog for quite a while, and I’m currently Continue reading

Coursera wants to be the Google of the education world. You can’t complain about your email if the email is free, right? And the same thing holds true with their courses. So when things like this happen in the course I am taking, where the exact answers to pass the final are revealed by mistake Continue reading

For a long time we have talked about the great unbundling. Roughly stated, a college course consists of content, some activity around that content, and some credit/assessment. Using terms from Matheos and Siemens we can talk about Content, Interaction, and Accreditation (I understand that the terms there are applied at the broader institutional level, but Continue reading