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Tag: MOOCs

Offshore Education: MOOCs in Africa

If you’ve been reading the OTTSYDs lately, you’ll know that I’m more than a little skeptical when it comes to most claims about MOOCs, and the way they are going to change (or “disrupt”, in the current argot) undergraduate education.  The reason for this is simple: the MOOC value proposition assumes that higher education is about human capital development, not signaling.  This is fundamentally mistaken; for most undergraduates, signaling is enormously important, and obtaining a degree from a real, established

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March 7, 2013 No Comments

MOOCs, Data, and the Public Interest

One of the reasons MOOCs are interesting as a pedagogical experiment is that, being online, they generate lots of capturable data.  This should create a data-rich environment which improves our understanding of learning processes, etc etc. So why is so little data about MOOCs actually being made public? Katy Jordan of the UK Open University just put together a nice little graphic about MOOC enrolment and success rates.  While her conclusions are interesting (avg enrolment = 50,000; avg. completion rate = 10%),

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March 1, 2013 3 Comments

The Future of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

The extent to which MOOCs will be a genuinely revolutionizing force in higher education is going to depend on three things:  their pedagogy, their ability to convert learning into useful credentials, and their business model.  At the moment, it’s hard to see how MOOCs are succeeding on any of those criteria. Take pedagogy.  The techno-fetishist crowd wants people to believe that, just because a course is online, it must be interactive.  But this is simply false.  Though some MOOCs are

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February 28, 2013 2 Comments

Who Wants MOOCs?

Over the past few months, a lot of ink has been spilled, and pixels displayed, on the subject of Massive, Open, Online Courses (MOOCs).  For me, three particular types of stories have stood out: two by their presence, and one by its absence. The first kind are those breathless, OTT pieces about how MOOCs are either “changing universities for good” (Don Tapscott), or “definitely a disruptive industry” (Clayton Christensen).  It’s never entirely clear what the factual basis for these claims

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February 27, 2013 1 Comment

MOOCs vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been paying attention at all to higher ed stories in the past year or so, you’ll recognize that, apart from cutbacks, people are mainly talking about two things: Massive, Open, Online Classes (MOOCs), and Learning Outcomes. MOOCs weren’t invented to respond to cutbacks, but policymakers sure seem to treat them as if they were.  The idea that someone out there is giving away courses for FREE just seems like manna from heaven.  Good someones, too: Harvard, MIT, Duke,

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February 26, 2013 3 Comments

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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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