Hapgood

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

Here’s my progress in a Stanford Online course: The problem is that I didn’t really try on this. I just hit answers till I got it right, and it let me try again. I’ve been through online courses like this before — when the week gets heavy with other obligations the click-itis begins. You don’t… Continue reading

It’s a Gates funded project, but it jives with how I’ve been thinking about MOOCs lately: Once they’re in, Portmont students will meet up for a one-week, one-credit intensive orientation where ideally they’ll bond with their classmates and the personal “success coaches” that are part of Portmont’s faculty, before heading back home to work on… Continue reading

It’s interesting to see this on the front page of the Coursera course I’m taking: Obviously what has happened here is that Johns Hopkins and Kevin Frick have negotiated additional rights for Coursera to this OCW material, which allows them to use it commercially. Which is as it should be — that’s how CC licences… Continue reading

I’m still going through the process of cleaning up some old posts damaged by the database, and tonight I found this one I wrote on OpenCourseWare from 2009: Rise of the Cohort, Educational and Otherwise Posted on January 9, 2009  “Cohort” is a term used in sociology and education that refers to a group of people that… Continue reading