Clint Lalonde's List: Alt HigherEd

Article based on radio documentary about Western Governors U in Washington

MOOCs will not inherently gut faculty positions in higher education. They do not have automation and robot grading built into their conceptual structure. They certainly offer the capacity for these things, if backed by scale and prestige and neoliberal values of efficiency and market niche domination: they offer the potential to look like disruptive innovation while consolidating the market interests of elite brands within higher education. Udacity's partnership with Pearson? Perhaps a case in point
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<br />MOOCs grew, initially, as learning networks of emergent knowledge focused around educational technologies - in other words, around complexity and disruptive innovation in higher ed. Oh, the irony! In their first inaugurations, led by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier, MOOCs weren't especially aimed at disrupting the university at all. They weren't about the university, but about an alternate environment for learning. As Downes put it, "MOOCs don't change the nature of the game; they're playing a different game entirely."

Some possible ways Coursera is looking to monitize.

MOOC story from Sunday morning

Tips from George Siemens on how to design and run a MOOC (not the Coursera type)

The beginnings of a taxonomy for MOOC's? Outlines 3 different types of MOOC's based on wether they are primarily task based, network based or content based. Although there is overlap between the three

Student created MOOC. Awesome

So, you want to MOOC? Great post for those thinking of teaching this way.

More on MOOC's from george Siemens spelling out differences

Spells out nicely some of the differences between MOOC models that are emerging

In the end, almost 155,000 people registered for 6.002x. Of those, roughly 23,000 tried the first problem set, 9,000 passed the midterm, and 7,157 passed the course as a whole.

They're now a bonded community," Agarwal says. "They asked us if there was a way they could keep the community alive. So we agreed not to take the [6.002x] website down. All the students who had previous accounts could continue interacting on the discussion forums and so on."

Coursera is another one of the MOOC-ish startups that seem to be popping up like dandelions these days. They have put some thought and research into their pedagogical model, which is refreshing to see from an EdTech startup as so many of these sites/services are VC funded looking to ride the EdTech hype wave that seems to be happening in Silicon Valley right now.

Directory of MOOC's and MOOC providers, from Stephen Downes.