Multilitteratus Incognitus

I was reading this article on Slate the other day about Georgia Tech's MOOC based MA in Computer Science which will cost around $6,000 for those interested in taking part in it. Even though Georgia Tech's Online Education MOOC crashed and burned, I am really curious to see this launch and succeed. If this is the program they are thinking of going full MOOC on, I think it may just work. Why do I think this? Well, first of all, it's a program in the sciences. Unlike the humanities, the deliverable requirements, on the part of the learners, are a bit different. This is something that can can be seen in the Coursera and EdX platforms. Since their genesis was in the sciences, they are not immediately a good fit for a collaborative, social constructivist learning environment that has come to be expected in the social sciences. While I have no doubt that the platforms will evolve, there are some initial constraints there due to their science genesis. Since  the science home...

For a while now I've been thinking of having a Weekend Column on here, something to give my blogging a little more regularity now that I am MOOCless (until the fall anyway) and not reflecting as much on the learning experiences in various MOOC setups.  I was going to have a "ID Stuff: Tin Foil Hat edition" (or "Cynic's Corner") column after I read this article ( Who is driving the online locomotive ) on the Chronicle the other day, but that seemed a juvenile. I don't know if there are many tin-foil-hat types in academia (someone please enlighten me), but this article seemed particularly bad, so I thought I would respond to it. The article is written by a community college professor who is wondering who is behind this push for online. What really struck me about this article is that it's written as if it's not written in 2013, but rather it sounds like concerns someone would have in 2003. I say this because our own university system started offe...

Since I returned from vacation I've been catching up on news that happened while I was away, and listening to podcasts from May that I had downloaded to take with me to listen to, but due to the hustle and bustle of vacation, I ended up not listening to anything I downloaded.  I was listening to a podcast from NPR's education feed when they were reporting on MOOCs and certain school's apprehension toward them.  The first thing, right out of the gate, is that somehow MOOCs and Online Education have become synonymous.  While MOOCs are a subset of Online Education, I wouldn't equate one with the other. That said, I put my skepticism aside and listened on.  The first thing that came up, from the critics, was that MOOCs wouldn't be able to replace learning that happens in undergraduate courses, especially those in the 100 level, because students come to college under-prepared, so they don't necessarily know how to learn, in other words they don't have good st...

So I am back from vacation, and onto the MOOC path again. I am not sure if vacationing has made me a little less interested in MOOCs (and more interested in things like sitting on my deck, drinking coffee and reading a good book), or if the glut of xMOOCs, the commercial rush for people to make LMSs for them, and the elitism of certain providers as to which institutions can join their club. All of this seems to have eroded away the openness of the concept of MOOC. Luckily we have original MOOCs (cMOOC) still around, and edupunks interested in continuing with them, but the news seems to only consider xMOOCs. In any case, I was reflecting a bit on my own xMOOC experience, reflecting on the Banking Model of education , and thinking of the spirit of autodidactism that seemed to go hand-in-hand with the original MOOCs (cMOOCs now). In thinking about the design of the MOOCs that have I have attended (or completed) on EdX and Coursera it seems to me that the current course design is heavily...