Contenu connexe
Similaire à 한국에서 아이비리그대학 학점 따기 Mooc (3)
Similaire à 한국에서 아이비리그대학 학점 따기 Mooc (3) (10)
한국에서 아이비리그대학 학점 따기 Mooc (3)
- 6. 6
MOOC Symposium ay the MOFET institute/by Dalit Levy on Jul 04, 2013
MOOC 강의제공 경험담
4 Professors Discuss Teaching Free Online Courses for Thousands of
Students
It is also exciting to see students forming communities within the
discussion forums, to help one another with questions about content or
technology. Our more ambitious students have developed study guides.
Some selfidentified writingandcommunication instructors have formed
their own forum, to consider how they can use our course to teach their
own students.
The most rewarding aspect of the course is the weekly “Hangout”
session, livestreamed using Google Air. We invite students to join the
discussions and ask questions. Finally, I get to know some of my
students!
So, what hasn’t gone as planned? Certainly some things do not translate
from a traditional classroom course to a MOOC. Our team realized quickly
that we needed to do a better job crosslinking material on the course site.
For example, if we mention the syllabus, we must link to it. Some students,
we have learned, want a great deal of guidance.
MOOCs and the student experience of blended learning
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And when you do embark on a MOOC, you can have a good learning
experience by considering some of the tips and strategies other students
and teachers have shared here.
Of course, MOOC formats may differ from one platform to another, but on
the major platforms you can expect to find more than video lectures. They
usually offer discussion forums, quizzes, peer grading exercises, exams
and readings to guide you through the content. Additionally, students are
inspired to create study groups and networks online (on Facebook, for
example), or even offline through the MeetUp website. Most courses
provide a syllabus with a schedule and detailed explanations about the
content.
Two Cheers for Web U!
I’m getting Ivy League (or Ivy League equivalent) wisdom free.
Anyone can, whether you live in South Dakota or Senegal, whether it’s
noon or 5 a.m., whether you’re broke or a billionaire. Professors from
Harvard, M.I.T. and dozens of other schools prerecord their lectures; you
watch them online and take quizzes at your leisure.
The MOOC classrooms are growing at Big Bang rates: more than five
million students worldwide have registered for classes in topics ranging
from physics to history to aboriginal worldviews.
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deadlines. You can rewatch the videos at any time and and retake
quizzes, if you wish. Usually after a lesson you will have a problem set
with exercises that will help you to determine if you have learned the
material taught in that lesson. These exercises will count towards your
mastery level. See the Mastery section in this FAQ for more information on
how that works.
How much does it cost?
All of our courses are available to take for free. However, there is a
forcredit path for some of our courses, which is clearly indicated on each
course overview page. You can learn more in this FAQ. The content of the
class is the same for both options. The primary difference between
forcredit and free classes are the support services and proctored exams
that are part of the credit pathway.
What languages are Udacity courses available in?
All of our courses are closed captioned in English. Many of our courses
have subtitles available in many different languages, including Spanish,
Chinese, French, Portuguese and even less widespread languages such
as Croatian. To see coursespecific information, go to the course's
overview page and click on the "cc" button on the video. To help us
translate our videos, join the Udacity team on Amara.
How can I get the most out of Udacity courses?
To get the most out of any Udacity course, it's important to be an active
learner. Take lessons as often as possible and be sure to do the exercises!
It's also great to practice and engage with other students through the
forums or meetups. Applying what you learn through different projects will
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Yes! Enroll in as many classes as you like, but know that each course is
about the equivalent amount of coursework to an undergraduate course.
What are the rules on collaboration?
Working with other students is often the best way to learn new things. We
hope students in the class will form vibrant communities, both online and
inperson, to help each other learn. The key is to use collaboration as a
way to enhance learning, not as a way of sharing answers without
understanding them. You are welcome (and encouraged) to view the
lectures with others, and discuss and work together on answering the
inlecture quizzes. For the problem sets, you may discuss the questions
with other students in the online forums and inperson study groups, but
everything you submit should be your own work. For the final exam, you
are not permitted to work with anyone else, and should only ask
clarification questions on the online forums.
What are my testing options?
We have different options for our courses. For all courses, there will be
final assessments that you can take on your own. For courses that need to
be proctored (in order for you to receive credit or certification), we have
both proctored exam at a Pearson VUE testing center and online
proctored exam on our site. We can also provide a "testing kit" to any
institution for a low fee if they are interested in providing proctored exams
on our courses. Please look at your specific courses to see options
available.
Where do I go to find official testing centers?
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“As I drive home, I sometimes think this is somebody else’s life,” Daphne
Koller says. She calls the experience “surreal.”
About Coursera
We believe in connecting people to a great education so that anyone
around the world can learn without limits.
Coursera is an education company that partners with the top universities
and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take,
for free. Our technology enables our partners to teach millions of students
rather than hundreds.
We envision a future where everyone has access to a worldclass
education that has so far been available to a select few. We aim to
empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of
their families, and the communities they live in.
Our Courses
Classes offered on Coursera are designed to help you master the material.
When you take one of our classes, you will watch lectures taught by
worldclass professors, learn at your own pace, test your knowledge, and
reinforce concepts through interactive exercises. When you join one of
our classes, you'll also join a global community of thousands of students
learning alongside you. We know that your life is busy, and that you have
many commitments on your time.
Thus, our courses are designed based on sound pedago gical
foundations, to help you master new concepts quickly and effectively. Key
ideas include mastery learning, to make sure that you have multiple
attempts to demonstrate your new knowledge; using interactivity, to
ensure student engagement and to assist longterm retention; and
providing frequent feedback, so that you can monitor your own progress,
and know when you've really mastered the material.
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We offer courses in a wide range of topics, spanning the Humanities,
Medicine, Biology, Social Sciences, Mathematics, Business, Computer
Science, and many others. Whether you're looking to improve your
resume, advance your career, or just learn more and expand your
knowledge, we hope there will be multiple courses that you find
interesting.
teaching methods that use active learning and interactive engagement
between faculty and students, and between students and their peers
Coursera Takes A Big Step Toward Monetization, Now Lets Students Earn
“Verified Certificates” For A Fee
Coursera today unveiled its next phase and what will likely be its most
significant source of revenue: Verified certificates./January 8th, 2013
Students who take a course on its platform will now be able to earn
“Verified Certificates” for a small fee. The new option, called Signature
Track, is available on a coursebycourse basis and is designed to provide
verification for the work students complete on its platform, giving value to
that work in the form of the startup’s first foray into credentialing. The
certificate, however does not include credit toward a degree program, it
simply aims to give them a more meaningful way to prove that they’ve
completed the course.
Students will have up to three weeks from the beginning of the course to
sign up for a Signature Track. If they participate, they take two photos with
their webcam, one of themselves, the other of a photo ID and create a
“biometric profile of their unique typing patterns by typing a short phrase.”
When submitting work for a course, they type the same phrase to match
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the record to their ID. Upon completion, students receive a certificate
issued by the university and Coursera, which they’ll be able to share with
anyone they choose via their “personal Course Records” page on
Coursera.
The price of admission into Signature track depends on the course, but
will range from $30 to $100, and students who cannot afford the fee will be
able to register for financial assistance.
Five Courses Receive College Credit Recommendations
Coursera is committed to seeing that our courses meet our students’
educational goals, from simply experiencing the joy of learning something
new, to seeking improved employment opportunities, to working towards
a degree. To this end, we are proud to announce that theAmerican Council
on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT)
hasevaluated and recommended college credit for five courses on
Coursera. Many students face enormous financial obstacles in pursuit of
their degrees. We want to help more students enter college with credit
already accrued and exit college on time, on budget and with a degree in
hand.
ACE CREDIT is a recognized authority in assessing nontraditional
education experiences, with more than 2,000 colleges and universities
considering ACE CREDIT recommendations in determining the
applicability to their course and degree programs.
The five courses approved for
college credit recommendation include four undergraduate credit courses:
● PreCalculus from the University of California, Irvine
● Introduction to Genetics and Evolution from Duke University
● Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach from Duke University
● Calculus: Single Variable from the University of Pennsylvania
And one course approved for developmental math vocational credit
recommendation:
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Track, you will be able to verify your identity with each piece of graded
coursework you submit, such as quizzes, exams, homeworks and
assignments.
At this time, not all courses featuring Signature Track are eligible for ACE
CREDIT college credit recommendations. Currently, only the courses
listed above are eligible for ACE CREDIT college credit recommendations.
Back to top
2) Signup for and take course's Credit Recommendation Exam
Once in the Signature Track, you must complete the online proctored
Credit Recommendation Exam at the end of the course. This exam covers
broad course learning objectives and tests your skills and knowledge in
the course material at the college course level. Your performance on the
Credit Recommendation Exam will be a large determinant of your final
grade. The Credit Recommendation Exam is separate from the normal
course final exam, though you are encouraged to take both.
The Credit Recommendation Exam will be online proctored, and
conducted on Coursera in partnership with ProctorU, which will provide
live human proctors who will digitally connect with you during your exam
session. You will need access to a webcam, a microphone, and a reliable,
highspeed internet connection for this (if you’d like to test your computer,
you can do so at ProctorU).
The Credit Recommendation Exam can be taken for an additional fee,
which varies by course. Please see Eligible Courses for the costs.
Signing up for a course's Credit Recommendation Exam
Towards the end of the course, students who have joined the Signature
Track will receive more information on how to sign up for the Credit
Recommendation Exam. After successfully registering for the Credit
Recommendation Exam, you will receive a confirmation email with
instructions on how to schedule your Credit Recommendation Exam
testtaking appointment with ProctorU.
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People from around the world come to Coursera with professional
aspirations in mind and some of our favorite emails have been from
students who have used their courses to find new jobs. One student
recently told us how the Gamification course helped him land a position
with a gamification company. Another student, Dawn, accepted a
communications position with the University of Illinois Cancer Center after
completing Fundamentals of Pharmacology. She talked about the course
content at length during the interview process and now uses her
newfound knowledge regularly in her new position.
With students like these in mind, we are developing Coursera Career
Services, a recruiting service that connects passionate and committed
Coursera students with positions that match their skills and interests.
If you optin to our Career Services, we will try to find companies that
match your interests, skills and knowledge. If you do well in a Coursera
class and allow us to share that information with potential employers (who
will have agreed to keep this information in strict confidence, and use only
for the purpose of considering you for employment), this could make you
even more appealing to employers.
We’ve been piloting the program for a few months and results have been
good! We use sophisticated analytics to automatically find good
studentcompany matches, and make an introduction only if we think
there’s a reasonable chance of interest on both sides. Recently, one of
our partner companies said “the candidates we’ve gotten from Coursera
are performing better in our process than candidates from any other
source.” We’re working with companies of varying stage and size who are
finding great talent in innovative ways, like Facebook, Twitter, AppDirect
and TrialPay.
Essentially, Coursera’s new service is an optin to a recruiting program
that allows students to find and connect with positions that “match their
skills and interests.”
Using “sophisticated analytics,” Coursera looks for matches between
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MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard University President Drew
Faust
WE’RE EMPOWERING LEARNING IN THE CLASSROOM AND AROUND
THE GLOBE
At edX, we believe in the highest quality education, both online and in the
classroom.
EdX was created for students and institutions that seek to transform
themselves through cuttingedge technologies, innovative pedagogy, and
rigorous courses.
Through our institutional partners, the XConsortium, we present the best
of higher education online, offering opportunity to anyone who wants to
achieve, thrive, and grow.
Our goals, however, go beyond offering courses and content. We are
committed to research that will allow us to understand how students learn,
how technology can transform learning, and the ways teachers teach on
campus and beyond.
As innovators and experimenters, we want to share what we discover. The
edX platform will be available as open source. By conducting and
publishing significant research on how students learn, we will empower
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University" Consortium is a forum in which members can share
experiences around online learning. Harvard, MIT, the University of
California at Berkeley, the University of Texas system and the other
consortium members are building the "X University" Consortium, whose
membership is expanding to include additional "X Universities". Each
member of the consortium will offer courses on the edX platform as an "X
University."
Open Source & the edX Technology Platform
What technology does edX use?
Features that are available or planned for the edX learning platform
include: selfpaced learning, online discussion groups, wikibased
collaborative learning, assessment of learning as a student progresses
through a course, and online laboratories and other interactive learning
tools. The first version of the technology was used in the first MITx course,
6.002x Circuits and Electronics, which launched in Spring 2012. Because it
is open source, the platform will be continuously improved by a worldwide
community of collaborators, with new features added as needs arise.
How is this different from what other universities are doing online?
EdX is a notforprofit enterprise that promotes the educational missions of
likeminded universities, all dedicated to improving our understanding of
learning and delivering better educational experiences both on campus
and beyond. The platform will also serve as a laboratory from which data
will be gathered to better understand how students learn.
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What is Open Source?
Open source is a philosophy that refers to making software freely available
for use and/or modification as users see fit. In exchange for use of the
software, users add their contributions to the software, making it in a form
of public collaboration. Before the contributions are officially incorporated
within the primary source code, an oversight body typically ensures
additions meet a certain standard of quality and usefulness. The edX
platform was made available as open source code on June 1st, 2013.
When/how can I get the edX opensource platform technology?
The edX learning platform source code, as well as platform developments
from Stanford, edX and other contributors, is available as of June 1, 2013
and can be accessed from the edX Platform Repository located at
http://code.edx.org/
My organization is interested in using edX software or the edX platform to
host our own content. What level of support does edX provide to do so?
Currently, the opensourced edX software is intended to be used by
developers who will contribute towards the platform development efforts.
While some edX partner organizations are using the platform to host their
own content, we don't encourage organizations outside of the partnership
group to do so at this point.
EdX does not offer hosting or support services beyond its partner group
at this time.However, edX may evolve its participation models in the future;
we may for example offer hosting and support services to interested
organizations. Future releases of the software may also offer self
publishing capabilities. Please check our website for updates about when
these participation models may become available.
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Public Universities to Offer Free Online Classes for Credit NYTimes ...
With MOOC2Degree, Academic Partnerships has collaborated with public
universities to offer creditbearing MOOCs as a first step and a free start
toward earning a degree. Through this new initiative, the initial course in
select online degree programs will be converted into a MOOC. Each MOOC
will be the same course with the same academic content, taught by the
same instructors, as currently offered degree programs at participating
universities. Students who successfully complete a MOOC2Degree course
earn academic credits toward a degree, based upon criteria established by
participating universities.
Academic Partnerships (AP) helps universities convert their traditional
degree programs into an online format, recruits qualified students and
supports enrolled students through graduation. Serving more than 40
state institutions, AP is one of the largest representatives of public
universities' online learning in the United States. The company was
founded by social entrepreneur, Randy Best, an 18year veteran of
developing innovative learning solutions to improve education. AP is
guided by the principle that the opportunities presented through distance
learning make higher education more accessible and achievable for
students in the U.S. and globally. For more information, please visit
http://www.academicpartnerships.com.
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TEACHERTOSTUDENT INTERACTION: D
As I mentioned, I had little to no contact with the professors. Not that I
didn’t try. I entered a lottery to join an exclusive 10person Google hangout
with my genetics professor, the Duke University biologistMohamed A.
Noor. I lost. My cosmology professor, S. George Djorgovski, of Caltech,
held office hours on Second Life, the virtual world. But the professor told
those of us who were Second Life virgins that we might not want to
bother, since the software is complicated.
A handful of lucky students got responses from professors on the
discussion boards, and a few handfuls more from teaching assistants. I
was not among them. Perhaps I should have been more solicitous, like the
student who offered to send one fluridden instructor camomile tea. The
professor gamely responded that whiskey kills more bacteria.
For MOOCs to fulfill their potential, Coursera and its competitors will have
to figure out how to make teachers and teaching assistants more
reachable. More like local pastors, less like deities on high. To their credit,
the MOOC providers seem aware of the problem and are experimenting
with fixes, like recruiting experienced students to guide discussions.Some
reformers have suggested an onlineoffline hybrid model.Students in, say,
Ecuador, could gather in a Quito classroom, watch the MOOC lectures on
video, and then have a local teacher facilitate a discussion. As I learned in
my science literacy course, it’s hard to predict what will work in the real
world, but this seems worth testing.
STUDENTTOSTUDENT INTERACTION: B
As psychologists will tell you, if you don’t talk about what you’ve learned,
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the knowledge will evaporate. With MOOCs, there is no shortage of ways
to connect with other students: Facebook, Google Plus, Skype, Twitter,
Coursera discussion boards — even shutting your laptop and meeting a
classmate in a threedimensional Dunkin’ Donuts.
I videochatted twice with a clutch of students in my Google Plus modern
history group. Our conversations on Haitian independence and the
professor’s possible firstworld biases were worthwhile and wonderfully
international: a Filipino scientist told me about his country’s education
system, and a Brazilian businessman shared a data point on his country’s
pronounced wealth inequality.
ASSIGNMENTS: B
Coursework comes in various forms: multiplechoice quizzes, essays and
projects
Of course, since students are taking quizzes without proctors, cheatingis
a big MOOC concern. As it should be. When I Googled some quiz
questions for my genetics course — as a journalist, I swear — I found a
Canadian Web site with the answers.
A company called ProctorU has designed software to allow its employees
to monitor students taking quizzes via webcam. When it comes to
cheating, the catandmouse game is likely to play out for a while.
Most of the quizzes are graded instantly by computer, but a few
assignments are judged by fellow students. I wrote an essay for my
“Aboriginal Worldviews” course in which I had to describe an American
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ritual as if it were foreign to me (I chose birthday parties). Three of my
peers graded the paper. They were kind over all, but I bristled at every
slight. Who died and made you professor?
The flexibility of courses
The flexibility of courses also may differ. On Udacity, for example, you can
start a class anytime you like and complete every task or exam at your own
pace. This reduces the massiveness and the opportunity to interact with
other students. On Coursera, classes have a start and an end date.
Although it’s possible to watch lectures at any time you want (and to
pause, start again, rewind and make your comments), most assignments
and exams have a deadline.
You might notice that most classes offered at the moment by universities
are introductory, taken from undergraduate disciplines. However, it is also
possible to find subjects in other levels or MOOCs specializing in a
particular field of knowledge.
Selfpaced, synchronous and asynchronous
The terms selfpaced, synchronous and asynchronous are applied to
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and teachers have shared here.
MOOC platforms set hours of homework every week besides lecture
videos, and the homework is either graded automatically or by students'
peers.
The importance of retrieval and testing for learning
Many people think that the primary purpose of homework is to assess or
to evaluate students. We believe that a far more important purpose is that
they drive learning, and ensure longterm retention. A key factor in the
design of the Coursera system is the extensive use of interactive
exercises, which we believe are critical for student engagement and
learning. Even within our videos, there are multiple opportunities for
interactions: the video frequently stops, and students are asked to answer
a simple question to test whether they are tracking the material. This
strategy has value not only in maintaining student focus and engagement.
Research shows that even simple retrieval questions have significant
pedagogical value. For example, in two papers in Science, (Karpicke and
Roediger III, 2008; Karpicke and Blunt, 2011) show that activities that
require students to retrieve or reconstruct knowledge produces significant
gains in learning much more so than many other learning strategies.
Mastery Learning
Many of our courses’ homework are designed to give students multiple
opportunities to learn the content and demonstrate their knowledge. In
many traditional classes, if a student attempts a homework and does not
do well, he or she simply gets a low score on the assignment, and
instruction moves to the next topic, providing the student a poor basis for
learning the next concept. The feedback is also often given weeks after the
concept was taught, by which point the student barely remembers the
material, and rarely goes back to review the concepts to understand them
better. In the Coursera platform, we typically giveimmediate feedback on
that concept the student did not understand. In many cases, we provide
randomized versions of the same assignment, so that a studentcan
restudy and reattempt the homework. This process is called Mastery
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Learning, and was shown in a seminal paper by Bloom to increase student
performance by about one standard deviation over more traditional forms
of instruction. This means that if in a traditional class 50% of all students
pass a certain (median) level of performance, with Mastery Learning, about
84% of students now achieve this level of performance.
Peer assessments
In many courses, the most meaningful assignments do not lend
themselves easily to automated grading by a computer. For example, in a
poetry course, we would want the students to practice critical thinking and
interpretive skills by answeringessaystyle questions, which do not have
clear right or wrong answers. Similar issues arise when we are evaluating
business plans, engineering designs, medical chart reviews, or many
others. This is particularly an issue in courses in the Humanities, Social
Sciences, Business, and other disciplines where a relatively small fraction
of the content lends itself well to an autograded format. Given our
commitment to offer courses from a broad range of disciplines, we have
invested substantial effort in developing the technology of peer
assessments, wherestudents can evaluate and provide feedback on each
other’s work. This technology draws on two bodies of literature: First, the
education literature on peer assessments. Following the literature on
student peer reviews, we have developed a process in which students are
first trained using a grading rubric to grade other assessments. This has
been shown to result in accurate feedback to other students, and also
provide a valuable learning experience for the students doing the grading.
Second, we draw on ideas from the literature on crowdsourcing, which
studies how one can take many ratings (of varying degrees of reliability)
and combine them to obtain a highly accurate score. Using such
algorithms, we expect that by having multiple students grade each
homework, we will be able to obtain grading accuracy comparable or even
superior to that provided by a single teaching assistant.
teaching methods that use active learning and interactive engagement
between faculty and students, and between students and their peers
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rates by making introductory and required classes — often a bottleneck
because of high demand — more widely available.
Joining Coursera will be the State University of New York system, the
Tennessee Board of Regents and the University of Tennessee systems,
the University of Colorado system, theUniversity of Houston system, the
University of Kentucky, the University of Nebraska, theUniversity of New
Mexico, the University System of Georgia and West Virginia University.
Some systems plan to blend online materials with facultyled classroom
sessions. Others will offer credit to students who take the courses online
followed by a proctored exam on campus.
Some will use existing Coursera materials developed by faculties at elite
universities, but others expect that their own faculties will develop
materials for the Coursera platform, making them available at campuses
systemwide and beyond.
Faculty members will be able to customize existing courses, adding their
own lessons and refinements, the company said.
Coursera’s fees will vary, depending on the size of the class. For a large
course, universities would pay about $8 a student to use the Coursera
platform. In addition, for use of content developed at a different university,
Coursera would charge $30 to $60 per student per course.
At SUNY, which has 468,000 students at 64 campuses, the Coursera
partnership is tied to Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher’s announcement this
year of Open SUNY, an online effort to enroll 100,000 new students and
make it possible for a quarter of them to earn a degree in three years.
Students could take courses at any campus, or at other universities on the
Coursera platform, toward a degree at their home campus. Dr. Zimpher
said it would be some time before a decision about how many of the
system’s online offerings, and which ones, would use the Coursera
platform.
Houston Davis, the chief academic officer of the University System of
Georgia, with 314,000 students, said that while the system would start with
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just a handful of Coursera courses next fall, he hoped a full menu of
general education courses — the gateway classes usually taken in a
student’s first two years — would eventually be available online through
Coursera, for sharing by all the campuses.
“As I’ve told the faculty, we’re not outsourcing content delivery or casting
students to the winds,” he said. “But there are thousands and thousands
of students in Georgia with a high school diploma, or some college but no
degree, and we need to explore new ways to reach them.”
The partnerships represent a new direction for Coursera, and for the
“massive open online courses,” known as MOOCs, that have
galvanizedhigher education over the last year, as millions of students
worldwide registered for free classes that carried no credit.
“Our first year, we were enamored with the possibilities of scale in
MOOCs,” said Daphne Koller, one of the two Stanford computer science
professors who founded Coursera. “Now we are thinking about how to
use the materials on campus to move along the completion agenda and
other challenges facing the largest public university systems.”
Initially, Coursera recruited as partners only the elite research universities
in the Association of American Universities. Now the company is eager to
work with a broader range of institutions, to see how its materials can help
more students complete their degrees.
Other leading online providers, too, have begun projects with public
universities: edX, the nonprofit collaboration founded by Harvard and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has teamed with the University of
Texas and some California State University campuses, and Udacity,
another Stanford spinoff, with San Jose State University.
Some faculty resistance has emerged recently against using online
materials, even if they are blended with classroom work. This week, 58
Harvard professors wrote a letter seeking the creation of a new committee
to consider the ethical issues related to edX and its impact on higher
education.
Both Dr. Koller and university officials involved in the new partnerships
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said that they had no intention of undercutting faculty control over course
content and that the provision allowing faculties to customize online
materials or put their own courses onto the Coursera platform was critical
to the project’s success.
“We hope this will help public universities do more with the less they’re
getting in state support,” Dr. Koller said.
William G. Bowen, the former Princeton president and founding chairman
of Ithaka, a nonprofit organization that studies online education, sees
promise in the arrangement.
“We have encouraged Coursera to work with the large state university
systems, and the large state university systems to work with Coursera,
because that’s where the numbers are, and that’s where there are the
biggest issues in terms of cost, completion and access,” said Dr. Bowen.
“It’s still exploratory, but this partnership has the potential to make real
headway in dealing with those issues.”
Five Courses Receive College Credit Recommendations
The End of Nuclear Institutions
There is compelling reason to think that unbundling institutional
knowledge provision and credentialing is not only gaining momentum but
is inevitable. Recent events confirm Peter Stokes's observation that the
fusion of the core elements of landbased education (faculty, curriculum,
credentials) is no longer inseparably tied to a single institution.3
The
emergence of MOOCs as an alternative to locationbound, proprietary
forms of campusbased learning and portals like edX, Coursera, and
Udacity that host them undermine the individually crafted course model
that sustains the "college credit monopoly."4
The acceptance of credit for
MOOCs by accredited institutions, such as Colorado State University's
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Global Campus,5
Antioch University,6
San Jose State University,7
Georgia
State University,8
and the recently announced MOOC2Degree
collaboration between dozens of public universities and Academic
Partnerships,9
the impetus from Gates Foundation grants to develop
MOOCs for "high enrollment, lowsuccess" introductory courses,10
and
the partnership between the Saylor Foundation and Excelsior College and
StraigherLine11
are all opening upa path to credit for free and lowcost
courses. A parallel movement away from seattime to competencybased
learning at Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire
University, and the University of Wisconsin System further erodes the
value proposition underlying the traditional model of landbased
education.
MOOCs, as currently designed, address two of the three challenges facing
postsecondary education: access and cost. MOOCbased degree
programs would not only democratize education, but their scalability
would help end the unsustainable trajectory of tuition. They are an
effective remedy to the "cost disease" plaguing higher education12
and a
viable solution to the problem of providing global access to educational
credentials
edX Offers Proctored Exams
Students enrolled in a free open online course offered through edX will
now have the option of getting their learning validated with a proctored
final exam, under a new program announced today.
The nonprofit onlinelearning venture, founded by MIT and Harvard, will let
students take onsite exams administered by the Pearson VUE service,
which has more than 450 testing centers in more than 110 countries.
Students who pass the tests will receivecertificates noting that they
completed a proctored exam.
In a conference call with reporters, Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said
the proctoring option would make the certificates“significantly more
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education has risen, its quality has fallen. Dropout rates are often high,
particularly at public colleges, and many graduates display little evidence
that college improved their criticalthinking skills. Close to 60 percent of
Americans believe that the country’s colleges and universities are failing to
provide students with “good value for the money they and their families
spend,” according to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center.
Proponents of MOOCs say the efficiency and flexibility of online
instruction will offer a timely remedy.
Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later
By TAMAR LEWIN;
New companies are partnering with universities to offer online courses, in
an effort that could define the future of higher education — if anyone can
figure out how to make money.
January 7, 2013, Monday
The MOOC Model: Challenging Traditional Education
MOOCs represent the latest stage in the evolution of open educational
resources. First was open access to course content, and then access to
free online courses. Accredited institutions are now accepting MOOCs as
well as free courses and experiential learning as partial credit toward a
degree. The next disruptor will likely mark a tipping point: an entirely free
online curriculum leading to a degree from an accredited institution. With
this new business model, students might still have to pay to certify their
credentials, but not for the process leading to their acquisition. If free
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access to a degreegranting curriculum were to occur, the business model
of higher education would dramatically and irreversibly change. As Nathan
Harden ominously noted, "recent history shows us that the internet is a
great destroyer of any traditional business that relies on the sale of
information."1
Colleges have a problem here: the way in which the core services of
education are rendered is changing, but the underlying business model is
not. This widening disconnect threatens not only the financial viability of
traditional campuses following the "Law of More,"2
but, more
fundamentally, their rationale.
A number of converging trends pose a challenge to brickandmortar
institutions:
● the emergence of the learning sciences and their application to
educational practice,
● the movement toward competencybased education, and
● new business models that effectively combine instructional quality,
lower cost, and increased access through unlimited scalability
(MOOCs).
A turning point will occur when a MOOCbased program of study leads to a
degree from an accredited institution. Indeed, we are already partially
there: students can now receive transfer credit toward a degree from an
accredited institution for learning not obtained at a college or university.
MOOCs: Quality Matters
Notwithstanding the importance of their role in reducing cost and
expanding access, the remaining unresolved issue facing the acceptance
of MOOCs is access to what? The major obstacle to their acceptance
relates to the third challenge: their quality. As some rightly point out,
current course models can aptly be described as"selfservice learning and
crowdsourced teaching."13
Although selfdirected learning and peer
mentoring have instructional benefits when part of a welldesigned
curriculum, most MOOCs (especially in STEM areas) are designed in a way
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that skews toward autodidacts and more advanced learners. Novice
learners needing instructional guidance are largely on their own and no
better off perhaps than those in a large gateway course delivered in a
lecture hall on campus. Although improving the quality of student learning
is one of the priorities of the major MOOC providers, most of their courses
currently lack a sophisticated learning architecture that effectively adapts
to the individual needs of each learner.
Addressing the quality of the learning experience that MOOCs provide is
therefore of paramount importance to their credibility and acceptance.
According to the most recent Babson Research Group survey, institutional
decision makers have yet to be convinced of the value of MOOCs.
Although not specifically attributing their skepticism to the perceived
quality of MOOCs, the report finds that only 28 percent of chief academic
officers believe that they are a sustainable method for offering courses.14
What potential, then, do MOOCs have not only to improve learning but to
provide the best possible educational experience? Contrary to what some
may think, designing the best learning environments does not entail their
being taught by the best professors or affiliated with elite universities.
Instead of simply using scholarly reputation and institutional prestige as
quality standards, we should judge MOOCs by how well they enable the
conditions that optimize learning for each student.
Although critics may scoff at the simplistic design of most current MOOCs,
it would be shortsighted to dismiss them as hopelessly inferior to
classroombased instruction. If there is one lesson from the history of
disruptive innovation, it is that we often wrongly assume that a product or
practice that dominates a current market defines enduring standards of
optimal quality. It would be a mistake, then, to think that the nearterm
shortcomings of MOOCs inhibit their potential to improve in quality.
MOOCs and other forms of open curricula will transform how people learn
only to the extent that they enable effective learning. What, then, might a
learningoptimized MOOC look like?
San Jose State U. Says Replacing Live Lectures With Videos Increased
Test Scores
In an effort to raise student performance in a difficult course, San Jose
State University has turned to a “flipped classroom” format,requiring
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Birth of cMOOC
The concept of MOOC was first implemented in 2008 with an openonline
course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at theUniversity
of Manitoba, "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge". The
environment created was a web site using aggregation, remix,repurpose,
and feeding forward of content and media identified bythe students using
blogs, YouTube videos, synchronous videodiscussions, and RSS feeds to
build knowledge structures within adomain. A MOOC is a platform! (think
Google Course Builder) Focus was on peerconstructed knowledge and
curation in a virtuallearning environment. cMOOCs emphasize creation,
creativity,autonomy and social networking learning.
MOOC Hyperbole in 2012 MOOC
The demise of the campus as we know it. The most important education
technology in the past 200 years. Free education for all, anywhere in the
world with online access. Professors at prestigious universities host
reviewable onlinelectures and curate videos, content and activities for
their students. Learners can tap into Ivy Leaguequality instruction on
their owntime, at their own pace and with little to no cost. Despite the
hype, MOOCs have yet to solve seemingly simpleproblems, such as
producing a sustainable business model andevaluating student
performance in a meaningful way.
MOOC Disruptive Innovation
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