Last week was Open Education Week (March 10-15). This annual event followed the final week of the “History and Future of (Mostly) Higher Education”, a six-week Coursera MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that several of us at the University of Otago took part in. #FutureEd (the hashtag used for the course in Twitter and other […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]