Part of the professional test-design experience I’m trying to bring to MOOC development includes the generation of specific learning objectives (tied to overall course goals) that spell out exactly what students should know after being exposed to course materials such as lectures and reading. This type of detailed breakdown will be familiar not just to […]
Learning by Doing
Well my break from blogging was not accompanied by a break from thinking about the subject of learning, especially that mix of real world and virtual learning experiences that might ultimately lead to a genuine rewriting of the rules of education. The first experience which triggered this line of thought came from a visit to […]
The Trolley Problem
While the sessions of the American Philosophical Society I described yesterday covered work I hadn’t directly studied during my One Year BA (albeit by philosophers I had taken courses on), the last session I attended dealt directly with something first discovered through a MOOC course: The Trolley Problem. For those unfamiliar with it, the Trolley […]
The MOOC Gorilla
When I started an economic discussion of MOOCs and what they’re worth, I anticipated someone would bring up the two-ton-ape economic controversy surrounding free online college-level courses: their impact on the traditional academy. I didn’t anticipate that this would coincide with yesterday’s story regarding the high-profile refusal of the Philosophy Department at San Jose University […]
MOOC Providers – edX
When the number of people enrolling in Stanford’s original experiment in free online learning exceeded expectations by an order of magnitude, educators, the media and policy makers took notice. But when Harvard and MIT each contributed $30 million to create the online learning non-profit edX (which I’ve been inadvertently calling EdX until now), it was […]