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Tag: MOOCs

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I haven’t written about MOOCs in awhile, mostly because I’m finding the whole discussion pretty tedious.  They’re an interesting addition to the spectrum of continuing education offerings, and they’ll exist so long as venture capitalists and large, big-brand universities feel like subsidizing the hell out of them. Period. The supposed “value” of MOOCs is that they deliver the same old lecture-driven process at a cheaper price.  But what should be our real priority right now: Making education cheaper, or finding

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December 21, 2012 1 Comment

Modularization vs. Learning Outcomes

If you’ve been near education conferences in the last year or so, the chances are that you’ve heard at least one of the two following propositions. 1)      “Modularization is the Future”.  People don’t need full degrees, they need knowledge in bite-size chunks, and they need it “on-demand”.  That means that learning needs to come in tiny little bits, and certification for learning needs to come in tiny, bite-size pieces, too.  This is partly what’s pushing the enthusiasm behind certain MOOCs and ideas like “Open

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November 9, 2012 No Comments

Maybe It Is Time to Pay Attention

As I noted yesterday, the strong likelihood is that to whatever extent higher education does move online, it will be dominated by a few strong players associated with strong brand names. The problem is that institutions with strong brand names are the ones least likely to risk those brands by messing around with alternative degree-granting mechanisms. That’s why, to date, all the institutions participating in either EdX or Coursera have been very firm about keeping everything on a non-credit basis. If

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September 12, 2012 No Comments

Overhyped Higher Education Meme, Summer 2012 Edition

I’d be remiss not to mention the latest round of educational techno-fetishist whooping that has accompanied recent announcements from EdX and Coursera. To recap: Berkeley has crashed the Harvard-MIT party at Edx (formerly MITx), a system for providing free online courses. Meanwhile, online education company Coursera has signed up a large number of universities – including the University of Toronto. Coursera and EdX are both providing free, non-credit courses to worldwide audiences; the main difference is that EdX is a

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July 30, 2012 5 Comments

Why MITx Changes Very Little

Just now, there are a lot of interesting online educational experiments popping up, like Sebastian Thrun’s Udacity, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MITx project. But there’s a huge barrier to this happening, and that barrier is credentialism. People who focus on higher education don’t always get this, because they really care about learning. And because of this, they tend to focus on learning content rather than on the pieces of paper one gets at the end of it. But

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February 9, 2012 1 Comment

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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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