Letting the inmates run the asylum...or not?
On of the themes that has come up time and again in MOOCs is the nature of openness. It's also come up in my twitter stream these past couple of days with Educause 11 underway, and Blackboard announcing that they are now open (I will reserve my cynicism and scoffing for other media ;-) ). One of the ways in which MOOCs are reported to be open is that MOOCs allow the participants (learners) to define their own learning goals and learning outcomes and what this translates to, generally, is an "everything goes" attitude from MOOC participants. I don't disagree that having learners have their own personally meaningful goals is important. After all many research studies have shown that if a learner has strong internal motivation (as exhibited in MOOC by having your own set goals), then the learning is much more meaningful to the learner and they take away more. This is great, but in my opinion it doesn't absolve the instructor, the instructional...