What If Free Online Courses Weren’t Inside ‘Walled Gardens’?
Large-scale on-line programs referred to as MOOCs can get hundreds of thousands of registered customers over time. But one on-line studying pioneer, Stephen Downes, says that these free sources are usually not dwelling as much as their full potential to assist college students and professors.
The drawback, he argues, is that suppliers of MOOCs, together with Coursera and edX, require registration to get to the supplies. In different phrases, the one strategy to get to all the fabric inside is to enter this walled backyard of the net course by registering.
You may be considering: What’s the large deal? Lots of web sites require you to log in to realize entry to content material, proper?
Well, Downes says the issues with requiring registration, even when it’s free, are many—together with that it makes it harder and even not possible for college kids to simply discover probably useful lecture movies in web searches or for different professors to assign items of the programs as sources in their very own educating.
Downes has a particular relationship to MOOCs. It seems he co-taught the very first one, again in 2008, with George Siemens, who’s now the manager director of the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge Research Lab on the University of Texas, Arlington. Their course impressed each the time period “MOOCs” and a complete new trade.
On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we hear from each Siemens and Downes about their ideas on what can nonetheless be discovered from the earliest MOOCs experiments—and the place they see open training going.
And it is an opportune time to rethink open programs. Earlier this yr Harvard and MIT and the opposite creators of edX agreed to promote their nonprofit MOOC platform to a for-profit firm, 2U. As a outcome, $800 million from the sale will go to forging a brand new nonprofit tasked with the mission of quote: “reimagining the future of learning for people at all stages of life, addressing educational inequalities, and continuing to advance next generation learning experiences and platforms.” And they’re at present having brainstorming conferences about what this super-well-funded nonprofit will do and what it’s going to assist.
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