I was recently told that MOOC news will be arriving rapidly and furiously this fall, and I’ll try to keep up with communication and analysis of any major developments during this period.
Earlier this week, I talked about the significance of the new edX-Google partnership MOOC.org and yesterday I got to see a copy of the first edition of MOOCs Forum, a new publication “dedicated to the development and sustainability of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).”
Unlike other publications that have taken on the MOOC beat as part of their broader coverage of technology in education (such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education and Wired Academic), MOOCs Forum is more of an academic journal that includes research papers, roundtable discussions, reviews and interviews focusing on technical and pedagogical aspects of massive online learning.
For instance, their first issue includes a “State-of-the-Field” roundtable discussion with Jack Wilson, President Emeritus of the University of Massachusetts; Peter Sloep, Director of Learning Networks at the Center for Learning Sciences and Technologies in the Netherlands; and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng.
The premiere issue also includes an interview with Peter Lange, Provost of Duke University, on the impact of MOOCs on a campus that has chosen to get heavily involved with the MOOC project. And original articles from both the University of Florida and Coursera demonstrate that MOOCs Forum will be looking at both academia and industry as sources of content.
As Editor in Chief Nish Sonwalkar describes in his opening piece “Why the MOOC Forum Now?”:
The MOOC phenomenon has taken root in every part of the academic world. The debate is vigorous both in favor and against the growing number of MOOCs. Although MOOCs are a relatively new phenomenon in the field of online education, investments have grown rapidly in both the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds. MOOCs started with a grand promise to democratize education across the world, but the realities of the academic world have presented many issues for their future. It is important for MOOCs Forum to promote the promise that is inherent in the MOOCs movement, thereby preventing the undertaking from ending as a mere fad.
I’ve yet to read through everything in Issue #1, but by a strange coincidence that issue includes a piece on a subject I was planning to write about tomorrow: the intersection of MOOCs and another Internet-driven phenomenon: Crowdsourcing. And tomorrow’s piece will be written in anticipation of this Friday’s podcast interview with Harvard Neurologist David Cox who is planning to break several barriers with a new HarvardX MOOC that launches on Halloween.
So stay tuned for more news and analysis from the cutting edge.
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