I’ve been internally debating the use of the term xMOOC to describe the Coursera/Udacity/edX offerings for a while now. This first came about when I started to study neoliberalism, and realize that there was not a true north definition; it was a term that fit the needs of the author, and usually in a way that cast scorn and dispersions on those umbrellaed via it.…
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Loading ...At the heart of the Open Education Resources movement (and the Open movement in general) is the notion that education is a public good. The progression to such sentiment may be based in a notion that an educated citizenry betters democracy and civic life (folks like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson), or that knowledge and wisdom are non-rivalrous and non-excludable (Econ 101), or that the increase and diffusion of knowledge stimulates societal and cultural growth (James Smithson, John Quincy Adams).…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Bryan Alexander is blogging with frequency again (hooray!), in his exemplary educator style — pose a topic, add information, perhaps include an informed opinion, and rather than end the blog with a definitive period have it linger for further discussion.
He is currently musing on the cost of college, the decline in college enrollments, and the general purpose of college in today’s society.…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Research plays an integral part in the archetype of a college professor. At state and select private universities (often known as Research I schools), a professor’s research record is as important as their teaching and service records, often more so. At mid-major and liberal arts colleges, research may not be as integral but it is still important and relevant.…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...A common theme in early MOOC criticism was a linking of the MOOC to Gartner’s Hype Cycle.
Certainly, a lot of hype accompanied the MOOC…more hype than for any EdTech innovation in education history, and perhaps more hype than for any learning model (or even agent of change) in higher education history.…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...One of the purposes of research is to establish a foundation of prior knowledge for future experiments to engage and extrapolate before proposing a new design that will further the field. This is important; without an understanding of what came before, research runs the risk of reinventing the wheel, or even (worse yet) coming up with something more rudimentary than the wheel.…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...If Anant Agarwal can walk around the Harvard/MIT Summit of Higher Education with a cognitive science paper written in 1972, I can herald the work of Soren Nipper and his generational view of distance education. The difference being, Nipper’s work is seminal in the history of distance education, and the piece is both critical of lackadaisical pedagogy as well as cautious of, as he calls it, computer conferencing without accounting for the numerous variables inherent in learning.…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...I want to compare two texts. The first is an op-ed by Richard Galant, a senior editor for CNN, entitled What if Students Learn Faster Without Teachers? The second is a 1987 video by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics entitled A Private Universe (you will need to click the VoD button next to the 1 in Individual Program Descriptions).…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Missed this a few weeks back, but at Inside Higher Ed author Ry Rivand covered a summit hosted by Harvard and MIT entitled Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education. While the proceedings were not quotable to the press, Rivand and other journalists had full access to presenters, professors and other dignitaries invited to discuss this future.…
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...I missed this New York Times op-ed a few months back from John Markoff, who writes about computers and technology. It’s your standard MOOC media narrative — great change afoot, the potential to fix the education crisis, and so forth. One part stuck out, though:
Udacity, along with other MOOC designers, is moving rapidly away from the video lecture model of teaching toward an approach that is highly interactive and based on frequent quizzes and human “mentors” to provide active online support for students.…
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