This link has been bookmarked by 89 people and liked by 1 people. It was first bookmarked on 13 May 2013, by Protea99 Smith.
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11 May 14
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A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential.
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10 May 14
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Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach.
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But MOOCs are controversial, and debate has grown louder in recent weeks. In mid-April, the faculty at Amherst voted against joining a MOOC program. Two weeks ago, the philosophy department at San José State wrote an open letter of protest to Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard professor whose flagship college course, Justice, became JusticeX, a MOOC, this spring. “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves,” the letter said. The philosophers worried that the course would make the San José State professor at the head of the classroom nothing more than “a glorified teaching assistant.” They wrote, “The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary.”
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think assessment is probably harder in those fields to begin with—not because it’s harder to assess but because it’s harder to define what you wish to evaluate.” Big data might help resolve this. The real potential of MOOCs, he went on, is to randomize input within a single virtual “classroom” in the way one can’t in a traditional setting. “It would be possible to randomly assign different teaching methods, and different approaches, and different ways of seeing the screen, and all kinds of things,” he told me. “And since the numbers are large and the potential for running many experiments is great, what you could do is completely solve, at least in an online setting, this huge problem in educational research.”
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Is the fact that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to revolutionize the tech industry a sign that their Harvard educations worked, or that they failed? The answer matters, because the mechanism by which conveyed knowledge blooms into an education is the standard by which MOOCs will either enrich teaching in this country or deplete it.
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a new type of college class based on Internet lecture videos. A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential. When you take MOOCs, you’re expected to keep pace. Your work gets regular evaluation. In the end, you’ll pass or fail or, like the vast majority of enrollees, just stop showing up.
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A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential.
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09 May 14
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MOOCs—a new type of college class based on Internet lecture videos.
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“open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up.
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course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential.
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07 May 14
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Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach. “I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings available,” John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial. “While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.
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05 May 14
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06 Apr 14
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Harvard’s first massive open online courses, or MOOCs—a new type of college class based on Internet lecture videos.
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04 Apr 14
Chelsea LongThis invites people to be involved in a course of their choosing online. It performs much like that of any school that you would attend. Grading, classes, and activities practically mirror the traditional learning that you would find in a classroom.
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A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential. When you take MOOCs, you’re expected to keep pace. Your work gets regular evaluation.
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27 Feb 14
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01 Dec 13
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03 Nov 13
Mike GwaltneyIt’s happening: juxtapose today’s Christensen+Horn NYT disruption piece w/ “Laptop U.” http://t.co/J3f35KkxxK #eLearning #HigherEd #edchat
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26 Sep 13
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12 Aug 13
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11 Aug 13
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Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach. “I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings available,” John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial. “While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.”
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Some lawmakers, meanwhile, see MOOCs as a solution to overcrowding; in California, a senate bill, introduced this winter, would require the state’s public colleges to give credit for approved online courses. (Eighty-five per cent of the state’s community colleges currently have course waiting lists.)
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“The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary.”
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Actors, musicians, and even standup comedians record their best performances for broadcast and posterity. Why shouldn’t college teachers do the same?
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Instructors in a seminar or small course might obtain modular materials from multiple sources and reassemble them in order to put together an entire course.”
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For decades, élite educators were preoccupied with “faculty-to-student ratio”: the best classroom was the one where everybody knew your name. Now top schools are broadcast networks.
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When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon.
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But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.
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In a lecture series at Stanford last year, he argued that online education may provide a cure for the disease he diagnosed almost half a century ago. If overloaded institutions diverted their students to online education, it would reduce faculty, and associated expenses. Courses would become less jammed. Best of all, the élite and populist systems of higher education would finally begin to interlock gears and run as one: the best-endowed schools in the country could give something back to their nonexclusive cousins, streamlining their own teaching in the process. Struggling schools could use the online courses in their own programs, as San José State has, giving their students the benefit of a first-rate education. Everybody wins. At Harvard, I was told, repeatedly, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
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Does it, though? On the one hand, if schools like Harvard and Stanford become the Starbucks and Peet’s of higher education, offering sophisticated branded courses at the campus nearest you, bright students at all levels will have access. But very few of these students will ever have a chance to touch these distant shores. And touch, historically, has been a crucial part of élite education.
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Access to “élite education” may be more about access to the élites than about access to the classroom teaching. Bill Clinton, a lower-middle-class kid out of Arkansas, might have received an equally distinguished education if he hadn’t gone to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, but he wouldn’t have been President.
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Meanwhile, smaller institutions could be eclipsed, or reduced to dependencies of the standing powers. “As a country we are simply trying to support too many universities that are trying to be research institutions,” Stanford’s John Hennessy has argued. “Nationally we may not be able to afford as many research institutions going forward.” If élite universities were to carry the research burden of the whole system, less well-funded schools could be stripped down and streamlined. Instead of having to fuel a fleet of ships, you’d fuel the strongest ones, and let them tug the other boats along.
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“I think the biggest threat to Harvard by far is the rise of for-profit universities.” The University of Phoenix, he explained, spent a hundred million dollars on research and development for teaching. Meanwhile, seventy per cent of Americans don’t get a college degree. “You might say, ‘Oh, that’s really bad.’ Or you might say, ‘Oh, that’s a different clientele.’ But what it really is is a revenue source. It’s an enormous revenue source for these private corporations.”
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A giant, detailed data pool of all activity on the campus of a school like Harvard, he said, might help students resolve a lot of ambiguities in college life. “Right now, if a student wants to learn What should I do if I want to become an M.D.?—well, what do they do?” he asked. “They talk to their adviser. They talk to some previous students. They get some advice. But, instead of talking to some previous students, how about they talk to ten thousand previous students?” With enough data over a long enough period, you could crunch inputs and probabilities and tell students, with a high degree of accuracy, exactly which choices and turns to make to get where they wanted to go in life.
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The promise of proprietary data-gathering is appealing, because, with digital life wearing down the gates of élite universities, schools are no longer competing solely with one another; their command of the educational marketplace is being challenged by industry.
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“It really is a value-added question,” she said. “What is the value added that a college or a university, and professional schools within the university, can offer?
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“An Avalanche Is Coming” cites Richard Florida and Clayton Christensen to propose that schools take advantage of an “unbundling” in their educational responsibilities in order to remain competitive—a popular idea among MOOC supporters. “
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One idea for generating revenue is licensing: when the California State University system, for instance, used HarvardX courses, it would pay a fee to Harvard, through edX. Another idea, geared toward the individual home user, is a basic per-course fee: you’d pay to enroll in a course you liked. There’s an existing market for tuition-based online courses—the University of Phoenix, for one—and, to compete in that field, edX will have to choose its per-course price points carefully. A model often mentioned is iTunes.
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magine you’re at South Dakota State,” he said, “and they’re cash-strapped, and they say, ‘Oh! There are these HarvardX courses. We’ll hire an adjunct for three thousand dollars a semester, and we’ll have the students watch this TV show.’ Their faculty is going to dwindle very quickly. Eventually, that dwindling is going to make it to larger and less poverty-stricken universities and colleges. The fewer positions are out there, the fewer Ph.D.s get hired. The fewer Ph.D.s that get hired—well, you can see where it goes.
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The language he heard from edX, he said, was the rhetoric of tech innovation—seemingly to the exclusion of anything else—and he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors. “It’s like higher education has discovered the megachurch,” he told me.
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To him, MOOCs look like a victory for open-access scholarship. “The question for us here was: How do you take what you’re teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group?” Bol told me late one morning in his office, a kind of paper jungle piled with journals, manuscripts, and books. “Unless I’m writing popular books, I’m not reaching those people. I’m not telling them stuff that I’ve worked hard to try to understand.”
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27 Jul 13
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26 Jun 13
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20 Jun 13
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11 Jun 13
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“While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.”
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There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves,” the letter said. The philosophers worried that the course would make the San José State professor at the head of the classroom nothing more than “a glorified teaching assistant.” They wrote, “The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary.”
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He subdivided every lesson into smaller segments, because people don’t watch an hour-long discussion on their screens as they might sit through an hour of lecture. (They get distracted.
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and I thought, My God, Greg, you’ve been spoiled by the system!” he says. At Harvard, big lecture courses are generally taught with help from graduate students, who lead discussion sessions and grade papers. None of that is possible at massive scales.
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Lecturing can seem a rote endeavor even at its best—so much so that one wonders why the system has survived so long. Actors, musicians, and even standup comedians record their best performances for broadcast and posterity. Why shouldn’t college teachers do the same?
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Supporters of MOOCs say that they are a different and heartier species. Rather than broadcasting a professor’s lectures out into the ether, to be watched or not, MOOCs are designed to insure that students are keeping up, by peppering them with comprehension and discussion tasks.
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For decades, élite educators were preoccupied with “faculty-to-student ratio”: the best classroom was the one where everybody knew your name. Now top schools are broadcast networks. New problems result. How do you foster meaningful discussion in a class containing tens of thousands? How do you grade work? Nagy’s answer—multiple-choice tests, discussion boards, annotation—is something like the standard reply, although there’s lots of debate.
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Access to “élite education” may be more about access to the élites than about access to the classroom teaching.
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King rattled off three premises that were crucial to understanding the future of education: “social connections motivate,” “teaching teaches the teacher,” and “instant feedback improves learning.” He’d been trying to “flip” his own classroom. He took the entire archive of the course Listserv and had it converted into a searchable database, so that students could see whether what they thought was only their “dumb question” had been asked before, and by whom.
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A giant, detailed data pool of all activity on the campus of a school like Harvard, he said, might help students resolve a lot of ambiguities in college life. “Right now, if a student wants to learn What should I do if I want to become an M.D.?—well, what do they do?” he asked. “They talk to their adviser. They talk to some previous students. They get some advice. But, instead of talking to some previous students, how about they talk to ten thousand previous students?” With enough data over a long enough period, you could crunch inputs and probabilities and tell students, with a high degree of accuracy, exactly which choices and turns to make to get where they wanted to go in life. He went on, “Every time you go to Amazon.com, you are the subject of a randomized experiment. Every time you search on Google, you are the subject of an experiment. Why not every time a student here does something?”
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Just how much is lost has lately been a subject of debate. At Harvard, as elsewhere, MOOC designers acknowledge that the humanities pose special difficulties. When David J. Malan, who teaches Harvard’s popular and demanding introduction to programming, “Computer Science 50,” turned the course into a MOOC, student assessment wasn’t especially difficult: the assignments are programs, and their success can be graded automatically. Not so in courses like Nagy’s, which traditionally turned on essay-writing and discussion. Nagy and Michael Sandel are deploying online discussion boards to simulate classroom conversation, yet the results aren’t always encouraging. “You have a group who are—they talk about Christ,” Kevin McGrath, one of the coördinators of CB22x, told me soon after the discussions started up. “Or about pride. They haven’t really engaged with what’s going on.”
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King disagreed: “I think assessment is probably harder in those fields to begin with—not because it’s harder to assess but because it’s harder to define what you wish to evaluate.” Big data might help resolve this. The real potential of MOOCs, he went on, is to randomize input within a single virtual “classroom” in the way one can’t in a traditional setting. “It would be possible to randomly assign different teaching methods, and different approaches, and different ways of seeing the screen, and all kinds of things,” he told me. “And since the numbers are large and the potential for running many experiments is great, what you could do is completely solve, at least in an online setting, this huge problem in educational research.”
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Written in a portentous tone and drawing heavily from the literature of tech-business strategy, “An Avalanche Is Coming” cites Richard Florida and Clayton Christensen to propose that schools take advantage of an “unbundling” in their educational responsibilities in order to remain competitive—a popular idea among MOOC supporters. “Some of the leading entrepreneurs of our times, including Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, dropped out of college to move to Silicon Valley,” the report says. “Driven by the purpose of city prosperity, technology hubs could be the universities of the future.” The idea is increasingly popular among a certain sector of the higher-education community. (The Minerva Project, an online-based liberal-arts university being developed with a twenty-five-million-dollar seed investment from Benchmark Capital, will have its students travel among as many as seven campuses globally, doing online-based work at each; Larry Summers chairs its board.) McCartney said, “I think it’s a good paper. I got it three times yesterday.”
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Courses in the HarvardX program are now free. That will change this fall, as Harvard starts conducting what it calls “revenue experiments.” MOOCs are costly to produce—Rob Lue, the HarvardX leader, told me that some courses require “in the hundreds of thousands” of dollars to get up and running—and so far there are no significant returns. The university regards its thirty-million-dollar pledge as a “venture capital” type of investment, and hopes to get its money back.
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One idea for generating revenue is licensing
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“To me, college education in general is sitting in a classroom with students, and preferably with few enough students that you can have real interaction, and really digging into and exploring a knotty topic—a difficult image, a fascinating text, whatever. That’s what’s exciting. There’s a chemistry to it that simply cannot be replicated online.” Burgard also worries that MOOCs may slowly smother higher education as a system.
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Each week, the law-school class has two Socratic sessions on campus. The online students, meanwhile, have “sections” on the Web, taught by the teaching assistants. Every other week, the whole group convenes, in person or remotely, for an evening session at the law school. Artists, writers, and other copyright holders visit and speak about their legal concerns. The teaching assistants are in the room, but also online with their Web students, who are watching the event through a Webcast. “The teaching fellow is monitoring this discussion, participating in it, and then forwarding questions into the room,” Fisher said. “So in the room there are two screens: one screening questions from the Harvard Law School students, and the other featuring the questions that are curated by the teaching fellows. And we oscillate the discussion between them.”
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10 Jun 13
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crumbling up the course like this forced him to study his own teaching more than he had at the lectern.
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How do you foster meaningful discussion in a class containing tens of thousands? How do you grade work?
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Drew Gilpin Faust
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“Part of what we need to figure out as teachers and as learners is, Where does the intimacy of the face-to-face have its most powerful impact?”
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If overloaded institutions diverted their students to online education, it would reduce faculty, and associated expenses.
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Access to “élite education” may be more about access to the élites than about access to the classroom teaching.
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Gary King
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When three great scholars teach a poem in three ways, it isn’t inefficiency. It is the premise on which all humanistic inquiry is based.
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MOOCs are costly to produce
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You can see how everything devolves from there
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He has also launched a course to let students get involved in preparing that program.
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Is the fact that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to revolutionize the tech industry a sign that their Harvard educations worked, or that they failed?
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05 Jun 13
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31 May 13
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29 May 13
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“skunk works
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“There’s the subtitle!” he cried delightedly from across the table
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A little later, Nagy read me some questions that the team had devised for CB22x’s first multiple-choice test:
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But multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays, Nagy said, because they spot-check participants’ deeper comprehension of the text.
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“Humanities have always been cheap and sciences expensive,” Ian M. Miller, a graduate student who’s in charge of technical production for a history MOOC intended to go live in the fall, explained. “You give humanists a little cubbyhole to put their books in, and that’s basically what they need. Scientists need labs, equipment, and computers. For MOOCs, I don’t want to say it’s the opposite, but science courses are relatively easier to design and implement. From a computational perspective, the types of question we are asking in the humanities are orders of magnitude more complex.” When three great scholars teach a poem in three ways, it isn’t inefficiency. It is the premise on which all humanistic inquiry is based.
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“It’s like higher education has discovered the megachurch,” he told me.
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Seb SchmollerThis article gets in a great deal deeper than a lot of other recent coverage. As always, the focus is on HE.
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28 May 13
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27 May 13
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Many people think that MOOCs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to MOOC development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach. “I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings available,” John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial. “While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.”
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23 May 13
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22 May 13
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21 May 13
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20 May 13
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Colin McNeil"Fisher’s idea is to constrain his online course as much as possible. Online enrollment in CopyrightX was capped at five hundred students. In picking students, he looked partly for a range of ages and professions: his goal is to seed knowledge of digital-
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19 May 13
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<!-- Start Headers --> <!-- End Headers --><!-- start article content -->Annals of Higher Education
Laptop U
Has the future of college moved online?
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Lecturing can seem a rote endeavor even at its best—so much so that one wonders why the system has survived so long. Actors, musicians, and even standup comedians record their best performances for broadcast and posterity. Why shouldn’t college teachers do the same?
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Vladimir Nabokov, a man as uncomfortable with extemporaneity as he was enamored of the public record, once suggested that his lessons at Cornell be recorded and played each term, freeing him for other activities.
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basis of a reliable education, it would seem, is quality control, not circumstance;
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effective teaching transcends time and place.
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World Wide Web the way that many New Yorkers see Roosevelt Island
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Harvard@Home
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MOOCs are designed to insure that students are keeping up, by peppering them with comprehension and discussion tasks.
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Long run, I see the online courses or online components becoming pervasive. Instructors in a seminar or small course might obtain modular materials from multiple sources and reassemble them in order to put together an entire course.
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faculty-to-student ratio”
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top schools are broadcast networks
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edX has been developing a software tool to computer-grade essays
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Where does the intimacy of the face-to-face have its most powerful impact?
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flipped classroom
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Students, if all you’re going to do is lecture at them, no longer see any reason to show up to be lectured at,
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they’ll watch the recording if your class is taught before eleven o’clock.
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digital storytelling”
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Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now closer to the MOOC experience
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Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind
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two economists, William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, diagnosed a “cost disease” in industries like education
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Although educators’ salaries have risen (more or less) in measure with the general economy over the past hundred years, their productivity hasn’t.
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online education may provide a cure for the disease he diagnosed almost half a century ago.
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élite and populist systems of higher education would finally begin to interlock gears and run as one:
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A rising tide lifts all boats.”
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Access to “élite education” may be more about access to the élites than about access to the classroom teaching
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Bill Clinton, a lower-middle-class kid out of Arkansas, might have received an equally distinguished education if he hadn’t gone to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale, but he wouldn’t have been President.
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nstead of having to fuel a fleet of ships, you’d fuel the strongest ones, and let them tug the other boats along.
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I think the biggest threat to Harvard by far is the rise of for-profit universities.
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social connections motivate,” “teaching teaches the teacher,” and “instant feedback improves learning.
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large-scale measurement and analysis,”
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proprietary data-gathering is appealing, because, with digital life wearing down the gates of élite universities, schools are no longer competing solely with one another; their command of the educational marketplace is being challenged by industry.
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he worried about academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star professors. “It’s like higher education has discovered the megachurch,” he told me.
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“The question for us here was: How do you take what you’re teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group?”
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Unless I’m writing popular books, I’m not reaching those people. I’m not telling them stuff that I’ve worked hard to try to understand.”
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the double consciousness of classroom students:
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Shepard Fairey and his “Hope” poster
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guru on the mountaintop,’ or the ‘broadcast model,’ or the ‘one-to-many model,’ or the ‘TV model,’
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learning requires some degree of interactivity, that interactivity is channelled into formats that require automated or right-and-wrong answers.
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CopyrightX runs simultaneously with the version of the course that Fisher teaches at the law school.
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Students in his law-school course, and alumni of it, volunteered to serve as “teaching assistants” for the online students
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it lets students learn by teaching, and it enriches the classroom environment by giving more time to discussion of hard problems.
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18 May 13
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17 May 13
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George StationLong article featuring Gregory Nagy of Harvard.
MOOCs higher education online learning online education college Nagy harvard
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16 May 13
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15 May 13
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14 May 13
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Ashley TanHULK NOT KNOW WHAT SAY! "Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now closer to the MOOC experience." http://t.co/RtTk7v1mbn
– EDTECH HULK (EDTECHHULK) http://twitter.com/EDTECHHULK/status/334437598443479041 -
koroghcm usAnother article about MOOCs and other online learning opportunities. Author talked to a variety of people. Has some good ideas and background information. Makes a good point how attending the elite schools may be more about networking for the future than anything else.
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Paulo SimõesLaptop U Has the future of college moved online? http://t.co/ewvPtz1uDE (via @oldaily) #elearning #edtech
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A MOOC is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential.
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Instead, participants in CB22x enroll in online discussion forums (like message boards). They annotate the assigned material with responses (as if in Google Docs). Rather than writing papers, they take a series of multiple-choice quizzes. Readings for the course are available online, but students old-school enough to want a paper copy can buy a seven-hundred-and-twenty-seven-page textbook that Nagy is about to publish, “The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours.”
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Supporters of MOOCs say that they are a different and heartier species. Rather than broadcasting a professor’s lectures out into the ether, to be watched or not, MOOCs are designed to insure that students are keeping up, by peppering them with comprehension and discussion tasks. And the online courses are expected to have decent production values, more “Nova” than “NewsHour.”
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On campuses now, the pedagogic ideal is the “flipped classroom”—a model in which teachers preassign whatever lecture-type material is needed, as homework, and use the classroom time for peer and interactive learning.
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The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.
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King rattled off three premises that were crucial to understanding the future of education: “social connections motivate,” “teaching teaches the teacher,” and “instant feedback improves learning.”
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A giant, detailed data pool of all activity on the campus of a school like Harvard, he said, might help students resolve a lot of ambiguities in college life. “Right now, if a student wants to learn What should I do if I want to become an M.D.?—well, what do they do?” he asked. “They talk to their adviser. They talk to some previous students. They get some advice. But, instead of talking to some previous students, how about they talk to ten thousand previous students?”
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“You give humanists a little cubbyhole to put their books in, and that’s basically what they need. Scientists need labs, equipment, and computers.
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For MOOCs, I don’t want to say it’s the opposite, but science courses are relatively easier to design and implement. From a computational perspective, the types of question we are asking in the humanities are orders of magnitude more complex.”
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One idea for generating revenue is licensing: when the California State University system, for instance, used HarvardX courses, it would pay a fee to Harvard, through edX. Another idea, geared toward the individual home user, is a basic per-course fee: you’d pay to enroll in a course you liked. There’s an existing market for tuition-based online courses—the University of Phoenix, for one—and, to compete in that field, edX will have to choose its per-course price points carefully. A model often mentioned is iTunes.
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In a meeting, one of Sitze’s colleagues, the political theorist Thomas L. Dumm, described the conveyance of MOOCs to weaker universities as “eating our seed corn.”
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“Two features that can be found in most of this recent wave of online courses are: first, what could be described variously as the ‘guru on the mountaintop,’ or the ‘broadcast model,’ or the ‘one-to-many model,’ or the ‘TV model,’ ” he said.
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“The basic idea here is that an expert in the field speaks to the masses, who absorb his or her wisdom. The second feature is that, to the extent that learning requires some degree of interactivity, that interactivity is channelled into formats that require automated or right-and-wrong answers.
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“It’s possible that it’s optimal for math, computer science, and the hard natural sciences. I don’t teach those things, so I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure it’s not optimal for social sciences, humanities, and law.
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As the wheels of CopyrightX begin to turn, the course tries to deliver on all promises of online education: it proliferates useful knowledge beyond Harvard, it lets students learn by teaching, and it enriches the classroom environment by giving more time to discussion of hard problems. It also is not massive, open, or entirely online. “This is an old idea—it’s basically the way seminars have been run for centuries,” Fisher said. “But it remains a good one.”
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Alan Garber, the provost of Harvard and a strong advocate of online education, told me, “Long run, I see the online courses or online components becoming pervasive. Instructors in a seminar or small course might obtain modular materials from multiple sources and reassemble them in order to put together an entire course.”
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On campuses now, the pedagogic ideal is the “flipped classroom”—a model in which teachers preassign whatever lecture-type material is needed, as homework, and use the classroom time for peer and interactive learning. “Students, if all you’re going to do is lecture at them, no longer see any reason to show up to be lectured at,” Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, who teaches computer science, told me. “Most of our classes are video-recorded, so they’ll watch the recording if your class is taught before eleven o’clock.”
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The answer is c). In Nagy’s “brick-and-mortar” class, students write essays. But multiple-choice questions are almost as good as essays, Nagy said, because they spot-check participants’ deeper comprehension of the text. The online testing mechanism explains the right response when students miss an answer. And it lets them see the reasoning behind the correct choice when they’re right. “Even in a multiple-choice or a yes-and-no situation, you can actually induce learners to read out of the text, not into the text,” Nagy explained. Thinking about that process helped him to redesign his classroom course. He added, “Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now closer to the MOOC experience.”
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King rattled off three premises that were crucial to understanding the future of education: “social connections motivate,” “teaching teaches the teacher,” and “instant feedback improves learning.” He’d been trying to “flip” his own classroom. He took the entire archive of the course Listserv and had it converted into a searchable database, so that students could see whether what they thought was only their “dumb question” had been asked before, and by whom.
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With compilation tools like this, online education turns from a dissemination method to a precious data-gathering resource.
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Speaking with King that afternoon, I mentioned that it was especially difficult to turn humanities courses into MOOCs. King wrinkled his brow.
“Why?” he asked. “Why should it be?”
Evaluating student performance on massive scales can be harder when you’re teaching qualitative material, I said.
King disagreed: “I think assessment is probably harder in those fields to begin with—not because it’s harder to assess but because it’s harder to define what you wish to evaluate.”
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Fisher’s idea is to constrain his online course as much as possible. Online enrollment in CopyrightX was capped at five hundred students. In picking students, he looked partly for a range of ages and professions: his goal is to seed knowledge of digital-age copyright law among people who will apply it creatively in their own circles and work. Unlike most MOOCs, CopyrightX runs simultaneously with the version of the course that Fisher teaches at the law school. This lets him link the two communities. Students in his law-school course, and alumni of it, volunteered to serve as “teaching assistants” for the online students. He divided the five hundred online students among these volunteers.
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13 May 13
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