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Tag: MOOCs

Intelligent Deployment of MOOCs

Since the likelihood is that venture-capital funded MOOCs are going to fade out, and (in one way or another) the format is going to come more closely under the control of universities, it’s worth thinking more about where exactly MOOCs can be of greatest use within higher education systems. The basic challenge is that MOOCs are individual courses, but what matters for most students is a degree.  The only way MOOCs genuinely make sense as part of a higher education

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November 20, 2013 3 Comments

The Future of MOOCs: Coursera and EdX

We saw yesterday that Udacity is leaving the higher education field in order to focus more on contract training.  In some ways, this is no surprise.  Udacity was always the weakest of the Big Three MOOC providers because, in addition to being a private platform, it was also trying to develop much of its own programming, which is quite costly. Coursera, on the other hand, outsources course production to big prestigious institutions – 70-odd of them at last count, including Canada’s

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November 19, 2013 6 Comments

Udacity has Left the Building

There was a big story in MOOC-world last week, which the mainstream press has surprisingly yet to pick up on; namely, that Udacity, one of the three big corporate MOOC players, has just left the building. Udacity, if you recall, was created by one Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford.  It was he who kicked off the current MOOC craze by opening up one of his computer science classes to the world, and then finding out that 160,000 people

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November 18, 2013 22 Comments

So, This Obama Plan, Then (Part 1)

Canadians have few – if any – original ideas when it comes to education.  Generally speaking, we tend to reuse American ideas a few years after the’ve gone viral down south.  But what with all these interwebs and the Twitter these days, the lag time on this is getting shorter and shorter.  That’s why it’s definitely worth paying close attention to the recent Obama initiative on college costs: there are a lot of themes in that plan which have resonance

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August 29, 2013 No Comments

Fired Up. Ready to Go.

Welcome back to our daily edition of One Thought to Start Your Day.  I hope you all had a relaxing summer, because this year is shaping up to be one of the most interesting in the entire history of higher education.  It’s going to be exhausting. As always, America – the home of mass higher education – will be setting the pace.  President Obama’s higher education reform proposals are so ambitious and touch so many hot-issues (metrics for institutional evaluation, how

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August 26, 2013 No Comments

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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