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A MOOC that will ‘cut across institutional boundaries’


Vanderbilt University and the University of Maryland (UMD) could create a new massive open online course (MOOC) cross-institutional model for higher education, and team up for a two-part MOOC on mobile app development.

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Each university will teach segments of the MOOC that last 8-10 weeks.

Many colleges have delved into MOOCs, while others have approach the massive courses with caution. Either way, however, MOOC implementation has been isolated to a single school working with a MOOC platform.

The Vanderbilt-UMD MOOC will have two segments, both 8-10 weeks long, hosted on the Coursera platform. The mobile app development class will start Jan. 6, according to a Vanderbilt announcement.

“This trans-institutional and interdisciplinary MOOC sequence will provide an exemplar of how intentionally coordinated MOOCs can create learning communities that cut across traditional institutional and disciplinary boundaries,” said Douglas Schmidt, professor of computer science and of computer engineering at Vanderbilt.

The MOOC setting, Schmidt added, makes what would have once seemed nearly impossible very doable.

“Creating such an opportunity for Vanderbilt and University of Maryland students alone would be incredibly complex in a traditional environment,” he said.  “With the MOOC platform, not only is it possible, it will now be available to learners globally.”

See Page 2 for details on how Vanderbilt has established itself as a leader in MOOCs…

Students will focus on varying aspects of mobile app development in the two parts of the Vanderbilt-UMD MOOC. The Maryland portion will teach MOOC students will learn the “user-facing portions” of mobile apps, according to the announcement, while the Vanderbilt side of the MOOC will be centered around “server portions” of mobile apps.

Cross-institutional collaboration is hardly new, said Cynthia Cyrus, Vanderbilt’s associate provost of undergraduate education. It is, however, an innovative step in the evolving MOOC market.

“Faculty-driven collaborations have historically been common in the research sphere, but the MOOC environment now allows that visceral excitement that comes from the sharing of different perspectives to be applied to the teaching domain as well,” Cyrus said.

Vanderbilt has established itself as a MOOC authority in higher education over the pas year. The university in May announced the opening of the Institute for Digital Learning, which will study online learning and MOOCs in a broader sense, encouraging faculty and students to research digital resources.

Fisher, a well-known speaker on the idea of “flipping the classroom” and a former program director at the National Science Foundation, stated he was thrilled to lead the new institute.

“The institute represents a commitment by Vanderbilt to understand the changes that are coming, to anticipate them as best we can, and to design for change,” Fisher said, “most notably for the benefit of our students, as well as opening new areas of research, in education, in ‘big data’ and other areas that we still aren’t sure about.”

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