E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

The last couple of weeks I was a bit busy with travelling and didn't have time to blog a lot about MOOCs. There are some interesting new articles and reports written about MOOCs. Here a selection:

Sir John Daniel - Making Sense of MOOCs: Musings in a Maze of Myth, Paradox and Possibility
The paper describes the short history of MOOCs and sets them in the wider context of the evolution of educational technology and open/distance learning. While the hype about MOOCs presaging a revolution in higher education has focussed on their scale, the real revolution is that universities with scarcity at the heart of their business models are embracing openness.

Educause - What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs
A publication of Education about the hype in Education for 2012.

New York Times - The Year of the MOOC
The line between online and on campus is blurring

Edudemic - 40 Useful Tips For Anyone Taking A MOOC
Whether you’re looking to online education for personal reasons or to get ahead in your career, use these tips to help you get more out of open courses and use what you learn to market yourself, improve your performance, and stand out on the job.

Clay Shirky - Napster, Udacity, and the Academy
Great post on MOOCs from Clay Shirky

Wired Campus - Course-Management Companies Challenge MOOC Providers
Two software companies that sell course-management systems, Blackboard and Instructure, have entered the race to provide free online courses for the masses.

Inside Higher Ed - MOOCs for credit
Coursera, the largest provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs), has entered into a contract to license several of the courses it has built with its university partners to Antioch University, which would offer versions of the MOOCs for credit as part of a bachelor’s degree program.

Learning Solutions Magazine - Ten Tips: Keep Learners Motivated in Your Open Online Cloud Course or MOOC
Setting up an open online course (cloud course or MOOC) is one thing, but keeping the participants motivated can be quite a challenge if you never meet face-to-face. The dropout rate of online courses can be huge, and for collaborative courses this can be disastrous, as it will have an effect on the peer-to-peer learning dynamics.

The Conversation - Online learning glitch: MOOC flaws will be hard to resolve
there are still a few issues that the MOOCs haven’t solved, and I’m not certain they’re going to be able to do so without significantly revising their model.

The Guardian - Online learning: pedagogy, technology and opening up higher education
Debate discussion with interesting participants.

Michael Feldstein - Everybody Wants to MOOC the World
But hype aside, it’s worth asking what it means for the traditional LMS players to be marketing themselves as platforms for MOOCs and other open courses.

BBC - Can schools survive in the age of the web?
A growing number of online universities are redefining education. But what will that mean for traditional institutions?

Michael Feldstein - Is Coursera Facebook, Amazon, or Pets.com?
it’s an uncomfortable truth for educational folks that one of the principal innovations of the xMOOC is the store front

Mike Caulfield - Who is accountable at Coursera?
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.