By Azer Bestavros
UC Develops Online Strategy
University of California undergraduates would have dozens of rigorous new online courses to choose from over the next few years, under an initiative proposed by UC leaders that would give students greater flexibility in progressing through their studies.
Hard-Core MOOCers
If people who sit at their computers for tens of hours each week zapping virtual monsters are hard-core gamers, then massive open online courses have led to a similarly obsessed breed of online student: the hard-core learner.
Who is reckless?
Dismantling departments and replacing them with MOOCs would be “reckless.” But, in such a case, “the fault lies with the reckless administration,” and not the professor who furnished the MOOC to the vendor that furnished the MOOC to the administration.
Higher Ed’s Creative Destruction
In the immortal words of economist Joseph Schumpeter, higher education is headed for “creative destruction,” a profound structural and economic shift in favor of employers, students and parents. The future will be grim if you run one of the 4,100 colleges or universities in the United States and are unwilling to embrace dramatic change. Especially if you run one of the 1,750 private schools that lack a top ranking from U.S. News & World Report.
MOOC: Textbook or Course?
In popular discourse of MOOCs, two dominant analogies seem to have emerged in making sense of MOOCs: MOOCs as textbooks and MOOCs as courses.
It’s MOOC or Die!
“It’s Mooc or die”, vice-chancellor of the University of Southampton, UK, has said, claiming that institutions must embrace the massive open online course movement and adapt their teaching methods or face a tough future.
A Call for Openess
Harry Lewis, former Dean of Students at Harvard, expresses a preference "for Harvard's courses to remain as open as possible, with licensing terms as relaxed as possible, on the theory that we should produce the best materials we can, try to recover our costs and a bit more, but not prevent others who can be even more creative that us from utilizing what we have to offer."
A Different Take on MOOCs
A different take on MOOCs and why they are not as transformative as Wall Street and the popular press makes it to be.
The MOOC that debuted in December 2011 was Sebastian Thrun’s “Artificial Intelligence” MOOC, a course that was offered at Stanford but opened up to anyone with a broadband. The way this story is usually told is that his incredible success—160,000 students, from 190 countries—encouraged Thrun to leave Stanford to try the new mode of pedagogy that he had stumbled upon. He had seen a TED talk given by Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, and when he decided to give it a whirl and it was a huge success, the rest is history. In January, 2012, he would found the startup Udacity.
However, another way to tell the story would be that Thrun was a Google executive—who was already well known for his work on Google’s driverless car project—and that he had already resigned his tenure at Stanford in April 2011, before he even offered that Artifical Intelligence class. Ending his affiliation with Stanford could be described as completing his transition to Silicon Valley proper. In fact, despite IHE’s singular “a Stanford University professor,” Thrun co-taught the famous course with Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig.
It’s important to tell the story this way, too, because the first story makes us imagine a groundswell of market forces and unmet need, a world of students begging to be taught by a Stanford professor and Google, and the technological marvels that suddenly make it possible. But it’s not education that’s driving this shifting conversation; as the MOOC became something very different in migrating to Silicon Valley, it’s in stories told by the New York Times, the WSJ, and TIME magazine that the MOOC comes to seem like an immanent revolution, whose pace is set by necessity and inevitability.
Duke and 2U
Updates from Duke on its engagement (now broken) with 2U... More
2U Unraveling?
Three top-tier universities have backed away from a partnership with their peers and the company 2U to create a pool of for-credit online courses.
