Tag Archives: MOOCs

Finding poetry in MOOCs

Finding poetry in MOOCs

Back in the heady days of MOOC mania, as readers of Academe will surely recall, it was almost impossible to avoid the omnipresent media coverage of massive open online courses.  The claims on their behalf hit the scene with all the force and ferocity of a revolution, a tsunami, or a silver bullet.  Here, at […] … learn more→

Far from bust: five ways MOOCs are helping people get on in life

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – free, short courses made available to everybody online – were expected to herald the end of higher education as we knew it when they began. But the hype soon died away and critics bemoaned the fact that learners quickly lost enthusiasm and dropped out in large numbers. After promising […] … learn more→

How to survive your PhD – a free course

A year and a half ago, ANU gave me a chance to make a MOOC. For those of you in the know, a MOOC stands for ‘massive open online course’. ANU has partnered with EdX, a MOOC delivery platform, so that thousands of people have the chance to participate in ANU courses from around the […] … learn more→

More MOOCs, more… what?

Just as he is, in many ways, the godfather to the blogs, Benjamin Franklin’s spirit stands over the baptism of the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Something new and different? No. As are all children, MOOCs were birthed out of a long line of ancestors. Franklin’s Junto and subsequent libraries, the Lyceum movement, New Thought […] … learn more→

The high cost of MOOCs

Calculating How High Is Too High and the Extra-financial Implications of That Cost. I subscribe to a number of newsletters related to online education. They very seldom include articles that question increased institutional investments in digital technology. So this one caught my attention. Writing for eCampus, Meris Stansbury surveys studies that have addressed the question […] … learn more→

The MOOC hype fades, in 3 charts

Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable. The […] … learn more→

5 Things researchers have discovered about MOOCs

In December 2013 a group of academics gathered during a Texas snowstorm and began the second phase of a discussion about massive open online courses. They were not terribly impressed by the hype the courses had received in the popular media, and they had set out to create a better body of literature about MOOCs—albeit […] … learn more→

How would you respond if that happened offline?

I vividly remember my exact reaction the first time I read about Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs). It was, “They can’t be serious, can they? How on earth can anybody teach 30,000 people at once?” Since I had already developed an interest in quality control for online education, I followed every new MOOC development […] … learn more→