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Tag Archives: edX

Invitation… Challenges, opportunities with MOOCs in Higher Education

Wednesday, May 29th, 2013 | Bill Anderson | No Comments

Following on from the successful Open Minds Seminar series in 2012, a Community of Practice has been established for Otago staff to share experiences and ask questions about what it means to be an ‘open scholar’. Over the course of our two-monthly meetings we might debate questions like:

  • Are MOOCs the greatest opening up of education ever or just an ivy league branding exercise?
  • Could I run my own class like a MOOC or use one within mine?
  • What does open access publishing mean for me?
  • What’s all this about governments decreeing that research outcomes must be made open?
  • What happens if I put my data ‘out there’?

In the first meeting we will be exploring the opportunities and challenges for higher education presented by MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Together we will discuss the principles of MOOCs, share experiences and look at the possibilities MOOCs present for Otago in more depth.

June 10, 1pm

University of Otago Central Library Conference Room 3

Some resources you might find useful to get you started:

Feel free to bring your lunch and come along with any ideas for future topic.

Openness around the world

Monday, January 21st, 2013 | Bill Anderson | No Comments

The current issue of the journal Open Praxis is devoted to the topic “Openness in higher education”. Have a read… http://www.openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/issue/view/2/showToc

Several articles discuss the challenges of assessment – especially when learners want to credit their open learning to traditional/formal courses …

What would you do if a student asked for credit from a Udacity/Courseara/OpenLearn/OERu course?? Is there anything you could do at Otago?

 

UK Universities enter the MOOC-o-sphere

Sunday, December 16th, 2012 | Richard White | 7 Comments

Yes, the heading is somewhat facetious, but the first UK-based rival to the massive open on-line courses (MOOCs) Udacity, Coursera and EdX has been announced. Led by the Open University, 12 UK universities will offer on-line courses for free from 2013, though details are sketchy at this stage. Martin Bean, the OU’s Vice-Chancellor, says that MOOCs have the potential to revolutionise access to higher education and that “we want to be well positioned” (as quoted by the BBC report).

Given that the Open University has literally millions of people accessing its course materials each year, which are open to all and licensed with Creative Commons for re-use, the move makes sense in that they may be able draw more of those potential students into some more formal means of engagement. Early indications are that they will follow one of the models offered by the US MOOCs, where access is open but you pay for an optional certificate for a course or for an invigilated examination. One challenge for this consortium – as with the others – will be how to balance the cost to students for the on-line courses against that of on-campus students, who in the UK face a real cost of up to £100,000 for a degree, a government report has revealed, once interest payments are counted.

The other lingering question is whether students in on-line courses will be able to gain credit towards qualifications. This, as Mr Bean says, is the “big frontier” for on-line education in the MOOC era where the cost to students is driven down by their numbers and organisations see less tangible but no less significant value in the reputation and brand benefits ‘open access’ will bring.

MIT and Harvard launch a ‘revolution in education’

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 | MARK MCGUIRE | No Comments

Several high profile open course initiatives have attracted a lot of attention in recent months. These include Stanford Engineering Everywhere, (especially Sebastian Thrun’s popular Artificial Intelligence course), the internet start-up spin-off – Udacity, MITx, Coursera (Princeton, Stanford, Michigan and Pennsylvania) and now  edX, a collaboration between MIT and Harvard. Class Central lists 53 ongoing or upcoming open courses from top institutions. Clearly, collaboration between several institutions, and between traditional universities and private providers, is a trend.

The following is from MIT News (2 May 2012):

Online edX courses will open both universities’ classrooms to the world while enhancing on-campus learning.

“MIT President Susan Hockfield and Harvard University President Drew Faust, accompanied by top officials from both institutions, announced on Wednesday a new collaboration that will unite the Cambridge-based universities in an ambitious new partnership to deliver online education to learners anywhere in the world.

The new venture, called edX, will provide interactive classes from both Harvard and MIT — for free — to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. But a key goal of the project, Faust said, is “to enhance the educational experience of students who study in our classrooms and laboratories.”

Continue reading this article here.