10 Things to Know About MOOCs in Online Education; U.S. News, 12/20/16

Jordan Friedman, U.S. News; 

10 Things to Know About MOOCs in Online Education

Are MOOCs Forever?; Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/14/16

[Podcast and Transcript] Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education; Are MOOCs Forever? :

"Think back to the early days of MOOCs. Professors at Stanford and Harvard and other places were suddenly teaching really big classes, free. Hundreds of thousands of students at once were in those courses. It was an unprecedented giveaway of what had traditionally been the most expensive education in the world.

Back then, I met several students who were binging on the courses the way you might binge-watch a season of your favorite show on Netflix. They took as many courses as they possibly could, powering through and finishing as many as 30 courses in a year. When I asked why they were in such a hurry, the most popular reason was that they thought it was all too good to last. As one of those binging students told me, "I’m just afraid this whole thing might end soon." Surely, universities would change their mind about this, or the start-ups working with colleges might lock things up.

Fast forward to last month, when Coursera did something that stirred up all of those concerns again. On June 30 the company deleted hundreds of its earliest courses, as part of a shift to a new software platform. Reaction, as you might expect, was negative on social media and blogs. One programmer called it cultural vandalism...

Hello, and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning Podcast. I’m Jeff Young, and I recently had the chance to talk with Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, about those issues."

Cheater, cheater, MOOC beater; Fortune, 8/26/15

Barb Darrow, Fortune; Cheater, cheater, MOOC beater:

"Researchers at MIT and Harvard this week published a paper finding that students taking online edX coursework were able to game the system by logging on as one person to check out online tests, scout out the right answers, and then log in again as themselves to take the test. Needless to say, that takes a lot of angst (and studying) out of the process.

This is not exactly good news for the burgeoning field of massive open online courses (aka MOOCs) popularized by the Kahn Academy but also increasingly embraced by traditional institutions. MIT and Harvard, with many other universities, for example have backed EdX, a MOOC platform, as a great way to provide low-cost education for lots of people and narrow the skills gap. EdX itself is a technology platform for packaging up and deploying online classes and is backed by MIT, Harvard, University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth, and other schools. Students typically can use edX to earn certificates but not degrees at the affiliate schools.

According to an MIT News report, the paper’s co-author Isaac Chuang, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and physics, said as they analyzed student data, they noticed that some users answered questions “faster than is humanly possible.”"

Over 50 and Back in College, Preparing for a New Career; New York Times, 4/3/15

Kerry Hannon, New York Times; Over 50 and Back in College, Preparing for a New Career:

"Students not seeking degrees often can audit classes at a local college or enroll in massive open online courses, or MOOCs, at little or no cost, via Coursera, Udacity, EdX and Lynda.com. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes allow students 50 and older who aren’t seeking to earn credit to attend classes at more than 100 universities.

One-year adult education programs aimed at professionals are also on the increase."

Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official; New York Times, 3/5/15

Kevin Carey, New York Times; Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official:

"The failure of MOOCs to disrupt higher education has nothing to do with the quality of the courses themselves, many of which are quite good and getting better. Colleges are holding technology at bay because the only thing MOOCs provide is access to world-class professors at an unbeatable price. What they don’t offer are official college degrees, the kind that can get you a job. And that, it turns out, is mostly what college students are paying for.

Now information technology is poised to transform college degrees. When that happens, the economic foundations beneath the academy will truly begin to tremble...

Free online courses won’t revolutionize education until there is a parallel system of free or low-fee credentials, not controlled by traditional colleges, that leads to jobs. Now technological innovators are working on that, too.

The Mozilla Foundation, which brought the world the Firefox web browser, has spent the last few years creating what it calls the Open Badges project. Badges are electronic credentials that any organization, collegiate or otherwise, can issue. Badges indicate specific skills and knowledge, backed by links to electronic evidence of how and why, exactly, the badge was earned.

Traditional institutions, including Michigan State and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are experimenting with issuing badges. But so are organizations like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 4-H, the Smithsonian, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York."

Are MOOCs - massive open online courses - the future of education?; The Australian, 4/5/14

Julie Hare, The Australian; Are MOOCs - massive open online courses - the future of education? :

"TODAY you can study with a Nobel Laureate - at home, for free. Is this the end of traditional university education?

Last August, Diccon Close went back to university, enrolling in an esoteric-sounding course called “Maps and the Geospatial Revolution” from Pennsylvania State University in the US. It was the first proper study Close, 49, had done since he passed his economics degree in the 1980s and he was pleased with himself when he gained a distinction. To do the five-week course, Close didn’t have to fly to the States or turn up to a campus. He completed it on his laptop in moments etched out from his frantic schedule while living and working in Sydney. His cohort consisted of 48,000 people from 150 countries and they were all connected through chat rooms and social media. For all he knows, he might have had a classmate living around the corner. Best of all, it didn’t cost him a cent."

Ex-Yale President to Join Online Education Venture; New York Times, 3/24/14

Tamar Lewin, New York Times; Ex-Yale President to Join Online Education Venture:

"Richard C. Levin, who stepped down as president of Yale University in June, will next month become the chief executive of Coursera, a California-based provider of online academic courses...

Mr. Levin, who has been an adviser to Coursera since January, has been experimenting with online education for years, beginning in 2000 in a partnership with Stanford and Oxford. In 2007, he started Open Yale Courses to make dozens of classes taught by Yale professors available without cost.

“The main thing we will work on is to establish this model so our partner universities feel that offering large-scale MOOCs is an important part of their mission that helps faculty expand their reach, and benefits the world,” Mr. Levin said.

Mr. Levin, who has extensive experience in China, will also work on expanding Coursera’s presence there. Already, he said, China is the second-biggest source of Coursera enrollment, after the United States."

Anant Agarwal: Why massively open online courses (still) matter; TED Talk via YouTube, 1/27/14

TED Talk via YouTube; Anant Agarwal: Why massively open online courses (still) matter:

"2013 was a year of hype for MOOCs (massively open online courses). Great big numbers and great big hopes were followed by some disappointing first results. But the head of edX, Anant Agarwal, makes the case that MOOCs still matter -- as a way to share high-level learning widely and supplement (but perhaps not replace) traditional classrooms. Agarwal shares his vision of blended learning, where teachers create the ideal learning experience for 21st century students."

With Open Platform, Stanford Seeks to Reclaim MOOC Brand; Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/4/13

Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education; With Open Platform, Stanford Seeks to Reclaim MOOC Brand: "Now Stanford is looking to reclaim some leadership in the MOOC movement from the private companies down the street. For some of its offerings it has started using Open edX, the open-source platform developed by edX, an East Coast nonprofit provider of MOOCs. And Stanford is marshaling its resources and brainpower to improve its own online infrastructure. In doing so, the university is putting its weight behind an open-source alternative that could help others develop MOOCs independently of proprietary companies. Why? "There are people who are uncomfortable for a range of reasons," says Jane Manning, director of platforms for Stanford Online, the university's new online-learning arm. "They've seen what happened on the research side of the house with the academic publishers, where academic publishers ended up having a lot of pricing power.""

Libraries in the Time of MOOCs; Educause Review, 11/4/13

Curtis Kendrick and Irene Gashurov, Educause Review; Libraries in the Time of MOOCs: "MOOCs give librarians new opportunities to help shape the conversation about changes in higher education and to guide administrators, faculty, and students through these changes. To assume this role, librarians must understand the MOOCs landscape. Numerous stakeholders will have an interest in the massive intellectual property that ultimately resides in libraries' owned and licensed digital repositories. Studying and adopting technologies to manage and monitor MOOC usage of library resources will be essential to controlling access and tightening Internet safeguards."

Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit; New York Times, 1/23/13

Tamar Lewin, New York Times; Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit: "In an unusual arrangement with a commercial company, dozens of public universities plan to offer an introductory online course free and for credit to anyone worldwide, in the hope that those who pass will pay tuition to complete a degree program. The universities — including Arizona State, the University of Cincinnati and the University of Arkansas system — will choose which of their existing online courses to convert to a massive open online course, or MOOC, in the new program, called MOOC2Degree. The proliferation of free online courses from top universities like Harvard and Stanford over the past year has prompted great interest in online learning. But those courses, so far, have generally not carried credit."