MOOCs: A path to early college

Today the MOOC platform Coursera announced a new partnership with 10 major state flagships and state university systems, the Hechinger Report reports. While Coursera’s existing university partnerships focus on professors at elite institutions producing and sharing online versions of their courses, these partnerships are different. The focus is on incorporating existing MOOCs and newly created MOOCs– covering basic intro level and general education requirements–into the universities’ offerings, flipping the classrooms at public institutions, using MOOCs as a catalyst for collaboration on teaching and learning, and to enhance access to credit-bearing programs. One area of innovation that Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller singled out to me is the use of MOOCs for high school dual enrollment programs. “I’m really excited about it,” she said.  “There are so many studies that demonstrate the benefit to students in high school in having access to college-level material. It encourages them to go to college and complete college. But that opportunity has largely been available to the most advanced students at highly endowed school districts that have teachers that can teach college-level subjects. It’s been a very inequitable offering.” Research suggests that having access to college courses doesn’t just benefit the highest achievers. It can give average performers a way to transition more easily into college and a head start on completing their degrees. It can potentially address the needs of the high percentages of public high school graduates who need remediation when they get to college. It could also save money, which is especially important for low-income students.

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What’s it take to make a MOOC? Hundreds of hours, no pay

Chris Cramer didn’t sleep much last semester. The chemistry professor and four other University of Minnesota professors are volunteering hundreds of hours to teach free massive open online courses this summer, the Minnesota Daily reports. MOOCs are open to an unlimited number of people from anywhere in the world who have access to the Internet, and the University’s MOOCs have drawn anywhere from about 8,000 to more than 16,000 students so far. “I’ve probably put 400 hours into preparation,” said Cramer, whose course started May 20. “That’s a lot of time.” Cramer isn’t the only one logging long hours on his MOOC. Assistant professor Jason Hill pushed his Sustainability of Food Systems class back from what was originally a May start date to mid-June because he needed more time to work on his lecture videos. Hill taped interviews between him and other professors at the University for his class videos, which he said could help to create more interest in MOOCs at the University for the future.

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To MOOC or not to MOOC? Harvard literary theorist Stephen Greenblatt ponders the future

Editor Paul Glader sat in on a lecture today at Frei Universitat by Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt, arguably the most notable literary critic today and a founder of the New Historicism literary theory. He’s a star, Wired Academic reports. He spoke about Shakespeare. Our ears perked up, however, when his response to the first question from the audience about pedagogy veered off into MOOCland: “At Harvard, there is a massive discussion about MOOCs,” he told the crowd of several hundred people crowded into the sloping auditorium in the university on the West side of Berlin.  He realized some of the audience didn’t seem to understand what a MOOC stands for. “If it hasn’t started coming here yet, it will soon,”  he said. So he explained it a bit, telling the story of Sebastian Thrun at Stanford and how he founded Udacity. He made a joke about Stanford being a school that aims to profit from this kind of technology. Regardless, he emphasized that the MOOC trend is rippling throughout Academia. … “Because this group is German, you have an unbelievable ability to sit and listen for long periods of times,” he said. “Now, people are breaking lectures into 10 minute chunks… for me, it feels like a death.”  

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Australian MOOC platform makes big claim about completion rate

Open2Study has a social component that helped boost completion rates, the company said.

Open2Study, an massive open online course (MOOC) initiative launched by Open Universities Australia, announced May 24 that 25 percent of its students complete their courses, more than triple the completion percentage of most MOOC offerings.

MOOC platforms – even the best funded options – have had trouble boosting completion rates for the free courses originally designed to draw lifelong learners to world-class curriculum.

Open2Study’s claim of a 25 percent completion rate is shockingly high when compared to recent research that showed MOOC completion rates to hover around 7 percent. Katy Jordan, an Open University doctoral student who conducted research into web-based academic social networks, said in May that her examination of 29 MOOC platforms showed that only 7 percent of people who signed up for courses actually completed those courses.…Read More

A 6-minute video may be Purdue’s biggest contribution to MOOC discussion

Purdue University is just now dipping its proverbial toe in the water when it comes to the hottest development in distance learning — massive open online courses — that is gaining favor among elite universities, the Journal and Courier reports. And that’s exactly the way Purdue’s top officials like it. Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are online courses designed to broadcast open-source educational content to global audiences, often for free and no credit. The online courses dominated higher education news last week as edX, the not-for-profit MOOC provider founded by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, announced Tuesday that it more than doubled its number of university partners. Those partners include University of California-Berkeley, Georgetown University and several international schools.

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The latest trends in MOOCs

MOOCs have taken hold at some prestigious institutions.

The battle for and against massive open online courses (MOOCs) rages on as we head into summer, with new arguments emerging on both sides of the MOOC divide.

Quite a bit of MOOC news has broken over the past month, including the plan to offer MOOC courses in a $7,000 online computer science master’s degree at Georgia Tech, EdX doubling its partner universities — with a few prestigious schools in the mix — and four in 10 colleges and universities saying they’ll adopt some form of MOOC by 2016.

LearnDash, a blog covering educational technology and learning management, recently published an intriguing infographic summarizing the latest — and emerging — trends in higher education’s adoption of MOOC courses.…Read More

The ‘Hype Cycle’ of MOOC courses

San Jose State University professors recently spoke out against the use of MOOCs.

The backlash from some corners of higher education against the proliferation of massive open online courses (MOOCs) could be an essential step that many other technological innovations had to endure before finding footing in a sector or industry.

In other words, faculty members refusing to adopt MOOC courses and colleges and universities rejecting major MOOC providers is a natural step toward normalization for MOOCs and the companies that host the courses.

Gartner, the information technology research firm, has applied its Hype Cycle graphic to myriad emerging technologies since 1995, using it as a “representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies and applications, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems and exploiting new opportunities.”…Read More

Going Gangnam style with MOOC rankings

There is no denying the gaudy statistics surrounding Coursera’s rapid ascent to be the world’s leading MOOC platform little more than a year since opening its virtual doors, The Australian reports. Enrollments of 3.5 million, 70 of the world’s best universities on four continents as partners, 374 courses ranging from archaeology to finance to medicine, not to mention more than $20 million dollars in venture capital. Coursera was born at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley. But its biggest convert may well be the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. …  In the short term, Penn is MOOCing itself to enhance its reputation and to project its brand globally. Penn may be a household name among the east coast establishment, but it doesn’t have the sports star power of UCLA nor the global veneration of Harvard. It is hard to quantify the real branding benefit for Penn but the right marketing question to ask might be: how much would a university of 24,000 students be willing to pay to guarantee 1 million prospective customers try its products? How much would Penn have to pay to search for and find the very top sliver of those customers worldwide, students of such potential that they could well thrive on its campus?

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MOOCs aren’t the only kind of online course stirring debate on college campuses

Over the past couple of months, massive open online course (MOOC) providers have been the focus of dissension on some college campuses, Gigaom reports. But now online learning company 2U is getting some pushback of its own. Last fall, the company, which has partnered with several leading universities for online masters degree programs that feature small classes and live instruction, announced a new for-credit online program for undergraduates called Semester Online. But three of the 10 schools that had originally committed to the program have since backed out. Last month, Duke revealed that it was withdrawing from the program after a faculty vote against the program. … “Each school has their own process for evaluating these opportunities,” 2U’s SVP of communications Chance Patterson told GigaOM, adding that the company is moving ahead with its plans to launch the program this fall with the remaining schools, including Northwestern, Emory and Brandeis. 2U also said that Boston College has since joined the consortium and that it’s in talks with 20 other schools.

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Georgia Tech to offer MOOC master’s degree on the cheap

The program’s core curriculum will be available to everyone online.

Georgia Tech will offer an online master’s degree in computer science for about one-sixth the cost of a traditional master’s degree through a partnership with AT&T and Udacity, a leading massive open online course (MOOC) platform based in Silicon Valley.

The online degree program will be available to about 10,000 students over the next three years, the university said in an announcement. The first students to take Georgia Tech’s web-based computer science master’s degree class will be selected from university and AT&T affiliates.

AT&T is offsetting much of the program’s cost, according to the school.…Read More

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