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Change and Persistence
My title might seem a crass reminder of the so-themed CUNY IT Conference in late November, and it is, but it’s much more about the thinking provoked by reading through the proposals submitted,...
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Divining Madness
The annual “special section” on online learning done by the Chronicle of Higher Education is out, and it’s (almost) all about MOOCs. The cover proclaims “MOOC Madness,” and the big article is “MOOC...
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(Not) Controlling the Future
Scott Jaschik, editor and co-founder of Inside Higher Ed, gave a talk at the CUNY Grad Center yesterday. Titled “Today’s Big Higher Ed Debates (and CUNY),” it promised to treat such topics as “the 2012...
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An “IR” of Our Own
The culmination of Open Access Week at CUNY was a series of presentations at the CUNY Grad Center on Friday the 26th. And while it’s wrong to settle on one day in a whole week of events, still more...
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MOOCs Redux
The Education Supplement of the New York Times this Sunday had a long feature article on “The Year of the MOOC.” The supplement cover has an albino rabbit, its pink eyes framed by the Os in MOOC,...
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Degrees of Openness?
At the EDUCAUSE conference in Denver last week, Clay Shirky did the big keynote. Though you wouldn’t know it from its title (“IT as a Core Academic Competence”), it was all about openness. The coverage...
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MOOCs Resurgent
MOOCs are in the headlines again — not just in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, but in The New York Times and USA Today. The reason for all this attention? The American Council...
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Positive Backlash?
Late last week, after all the attention given to MOOCs (massive open online courses), something new(?) made the news: a consortium of 10 schools the Chronicle of Higher Ed described as “highly...
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Money from MOOCs
A colleague sent me a very interesting article. (Thanks, Bruce.) “Coursera will profit from ‘Free’ courses“ its title declares. That’s not entirely new news. I noted some time ago that a freedom of...
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MOOCs in the Rear-View Mirror
It’s been a big year for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), indeed the Year of the MOOC. No one has done a better omnium gatherum of what the year has brought in the way of MOOCs than Audrey Watters....
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Changing by Degrees
The Sloan Consortium has announced the new Babson survey of online education — the 10th annual. (Tony Picciano posted on this yesterday, sharing the executive summary; this post is more of an attempt...
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Heal Thyself
I was struck by a recent blog post by Cathy Davidson (of Duke U and HASTAC), and not just because it opens with this slide, the one she opens all her presentations with here lately. “That gets people’s...
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Nibbling at the Edges
It’s a revelation to realize that all the recent, highly hyped moves by MOOC providers, which some see as revolutionizing universities, rely so much on the traditional forms and appurtenances of higher...
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Centrifugal Forces
“Associated with the role of technology is a new discussion regarding the ‘unbundling’ or ‘disaggregation’ of teaching functions,” Thomas A. Angelo and James JF Forest wrote in 2002. No longer so...
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A MOOC Point
I’m beginning to think that MOOCs, at least conceptually, are like Rorschach blots, good for getting commentators to divulge their fundamental premises about the means and ends of higher learning. Case...
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It’s (Not) All About Scaling Up
California made big news recently with something even more massive than MOOCs: a legislatively proposed “statewide platform through which students who have trouble getting into certain low-level,...
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MMOOCs — More Modest Open(?) Online(?) Courses(?)
Some backlash against MOOCs was inevitable. But things seem to be picking up steam. Last week, Amherst, after much wooing (and after saying no to for-profit providers), said no to edX. At about the...
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Whither the MOOC Backlash?
The backlash against MOOCs goes on. Like the ubiquitous acronym itself, the notion of a MOOC backlash is a regular feature in news about MOOCs. Last week saw headlines like “Faculty Backlash Grows...
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More Morphing of MOOCs
The changes MOOCs go through continue, some characterized and perhaps even caused by faculty backlash, with the latest wrinkle in that being the widespread consternation over multi-state, multi-campus...
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MOOC Monsters
Much as I love the parable of the blind monks and the elephant (see the accompanying image), there may be an even better metaphor for what’s going on with MOOCs. Two weeks ago there was a remarkable...
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