Joining the MOOC bandwagon, non-profit (and for-profit) companies are now springing up to seize opportunity to reach students who might not otherwise be able to get access to university education. Witness the birth of Coursera, which soon will be offering free online university-level courses to anyone who registers. The courses are taught by award-winning professors from highly ranked institutions in both Sciences and Humanities topics. One of the professors (Charles Severance) was chief architect of the notable learning management platform, Sakai. You can get a general idea of the course content from the teaser videos on their site, but it is difficult to determine how good the course materials will be.
Coursera courses appear to use the usual model offered by distance learning, in which videos of the professor and demos are combined with coursework exercises, quizes, and access to teaching support staff. In some courses, the professor is advertised as being available for virtual office hours. Whether they will also employ techniques such as peer-to-peer formative assessment, or group-based learning is unclear. I imagine that they will not take advantage of a broad range of cognitive types (see Bloom’s Taxonomy), as there are barriers to this due to the nature of distance learning. There are still some kinds of learning activities, particularly applied, practice-based activities, which benefit from the guidance of an instructor in person. You can’t throw a pot without getting your hands dirty. But this is a limitation that all MOOCs face in addressing such topics.
Also, no qualifications are awarded, and this is a significant factor for younger students. Receiving a degree will be a driving goal for many students, so it remains to be seen where the efforts of initiatives like Coursera will fit into the Higher Education landscape. At least they offer a better alternative for gaining obtaining a genuine education to for-profit “universities” in the US, which often operate with less-than-ethcial methods, and award degrees that have little or no value, despite the accreditation of many of the companies who confer them.
I and some of my colleagues in the Learning Design community are I planning a MOOC in Learning Design to be offered in the fall (details to follow, so stay tuned). And I recently signed on to a MOOC offered by Stanford in my own subject area, Human-computer Interaction – just to see how it will run. There are surely some technical challenges to be overcome in delivering effective pedagogy, simultaneously to thousands of students. I expect an O’Reilly book on MOOC best practices any day now. Meanwhile I’m thinking of signing up to see how Coursera courses are conducted – and maybe brush up on some of those rusty skills in the process…
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Late update! I also came across Udacity today, another iteration of the same genre, this one hosted (and funded by VCs) in Palo Alto…
