#mooc's

The New York Times. (2013, January 8). Welcome to the brave new world of Mooc’s. (Massive open online courses). [Video file] Retrieved from via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqQNvmQH_YM 

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Cool, more MOOC's

Jeremy Adelman, Princeton professor after teaching his first history MOOC

“MOOCs today are our equivalents of early TV, when TV personalities looked and sounded like radio announcers (or often were radio announcers). People are thinking the same way about MOOCs, as replacements of traditional lectures or tutorials, but in online rather than physical settings. In the meantime, a whole slew of forces is driving a much larger transformation, breaking learning (and education overall) out of traditional institutional environments and embedding it in everyday settings and interactions, distributed across a wide set of platforms and tools. They include a rapidly growing and open content commons (Wikipedia is just one example), on-demand expertise and help (from Mac Forums to Fluther, Instructables, and WikiHow), mobile devices and geo-coded information that takes information into the physical world around us and makes it available any place any time, new work and social spaces that are, in fact, evolving as important learning spaces (TechShop, Meetups, hackathons, community labs).”

Even though I'm sold on the potential of MOOC's to fundamentally transform higher education in the next 5 years this is a hilarious fiasco. "In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category, here’s an amusing piece about the failure of a MOOC (massive open online course) that was designed to teach more than 40,000 students the fundamentals of how to create an online course. It was written by Jill Barshay, a contributing editor to The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, non-partisan education-news outlet affiliated with the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, an independently funded unit of Teachers College, Columbia University. She has been a radio and print reporter for two decades.This appeared on The Hechinger Report’s Digital blog."

Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera, said some of the company's university partners have been wary even of submitting their own MOOCs for consideration by the council's credit-recommendation service. "For students to receive credit, even if that credit is sponsored by a different institution—that's a big step," said Mr. Ng. "I think it's still so new that a lot of us are getting used to the implications and what this means."

For their part, Ms. Koller and Mr. Ng proclaim a desire to keep courses freely available to poor students worldwide. Education, they have said repeatedly, should be a right, not a privilege. And even their venture backers say profits can wait.