“I don’t understand. You’re in the knowledge business in a university. Let’s say I had a shoe store, ok, and then I hired you to work at my shoe store. And you said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea! Let’s give the shoes away for free.’ I would fire you and then probably throw shoes at your head.” In other words, why would universities disrupt themselves and give education away at no cost? Watch Anant Agarwal explains to Colbert
Tag: MOOC
The Online Education Revolution [Essays]
MOOCs are big current news. But what do teachers think of it? This conversation began with teacher Alex Tabarrok concluding that online education works, expressing delight at the way it was able to leverage his 15 minute talk on TED, which was watched 700,000 times, which he works out to be equivalent to 175,000 student-hours of teaching offline. Kevin Carey (The Radical Implications of Online Education), Siva Vaidyanathan (The New Era of Unfounded Hyperbole) & Alan Ryan (Some skepticism about online education) weighed in with their views. Ends with Alex’s response to the participants. A quiet revolution is on-going in education, so this is a very pertinent read.
The Technology behind Online Courses [Article]
The Technology of Massive Open Online Courses introduces some of the people, & the technology that drives MOOC’s (Several links on the subject posted before here and here for more)
Getting an education [links]
The Internet has decimated the distribution system in a whole range of industries – newspapers, advertising, ideas sharing, communication, telecommunications etc. Education hasn’t been spared either. There are hundreds of online courses that offer specialised or general education courses, (Khan Academy, Coursera are a couple of examples). It has spawned what are called MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) from the likes of Harvard, Stanford, & other big-dollar universities, who don’t want to lose their advantage (& their revenues). Adding to the list, MRUniversity is offering a free economics education. Here’s a current collection of 530 free online courses, something might catch your fancy!