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MOOCs for Teachers: Coursera Offers Online Teacher Training Program

April 30, 2013 | 9:00 PM | By
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Flickr: UTCI Library

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have forced universities to reconsider their value in light of free high-quality education available online. Coursera, a private company founded by two Stanford professors has been at the forefront of that movement, actively courting new institutions of higher education to their portfolio and trying to monetize the effort by certifying courses for college credit. Now they’re expanding that model to K-12 teacher professional development.

The courses will be free to teachers, and for those who want a verified certificate, there will be a $50 fee. Coursera will verify that the teacher actually completed the course and participated fully along the way.

“In speaking to school administration leaders, I was hearing over and over that many districts today don’t have the resources to deliver good professional development,” said Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera. For teachers, Ng said offering professional development online gives them more choices and could save districts money.

“The important part is the interaction among the teachers which is something that’s very hard to replicate on a MOOC or any kind of online program.”

Coursera is partnering with schools of education at the University of Washington, University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt University. In addition, the company is expanding its network of trainers beyond universities to include cultural institutions like the Exploratorium and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

“It was the most natural thing in the world,” said Deb Howes, director of digital learning at MOMA. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, Coursera, MOOC, professional development

What You Need to Know About MOOCs

January 10, 2013 | 10:24 AM | By

Watch How Free Online Courses Are Changing Traditional Education on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

For those still trying to piece together all the different definitions and scenarios of a MOOC (massive open online courses), this PBS Newshour segment presents a comprehensive overview of the evolution of this phenomenon.

From the financial angle, MOOC startups are still trying to figure out how to make money. Udacity is getting revenue from several companies like Google to provide specialized courses. Coursera is charging potential employers for providing names of high-scoring students.

Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng of Coursera, students, and other professors who question the wisdom of these classes weigh in.

Student Tracy Lippincott’s perspective on teacher-student connection:
“The thing that I really miss is actually personal contact with the professor. I like to be able to get personalized advice from the person who’s in charge, and maybe just a little of like a thumbs-up, you know, just a little bit of positive reinforcement.”

Sebastian Thrun on his view of lecturing:
“It’s not my lecturing that changes the student, but it’s the student exercise. So our courses feel very much like video games, where you’re being bombarded with exercise after exercise after Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, Coursera, Daphne Koller, MOOC, Sebastian Thrun, Stanford, Udacity

For the Future Student, Higher Education Will Be Redefined

December 7, 2012 | 10:57 AM | By

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Not too far in the future, students may be faced with an entirely different set of choices than they do today. No longer might college or career straight after high school graduation be the two only and divergent paths in front of them. No longer may a four-to-six-year commitment to a highly esteemed institution be the fastest way to a fruitful career or a rich network.

With online education quickly gaining momentum, the emergence of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is not only shaking up higher education to the core — its value, its status, its cost — the movement is also changing how young people envision their education and their future.

Sebastian Thrun, whose free, online artificial intelligence class for Stanford last year enrolled more than 175,000 people and launched the MOOC movement, foresees a radically different future for students. Thrun, who founded Google X, the incubator for projects like the Google self-driving car and Google Glass, co-founded Udacity, a free online school that offers higher ed classes computer science classes — everything from Programming Languages to How to Build a Startup.

“Right now you go to college for four, six, seven years, and it’s a big commitment over a long period of time,” Thrun said in an interview earlier this week, which will be shown in an upcoming PBS Newshour story. “But in the future, learning will be lifelong, and it will happen in very small chunks. If you have an interest, a problem, if you need a skill, you’ll go find it and learn it. Things like Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Teaching Strategies, Andrew Ng, Coursera, Daphne Koller, Higher Education, MOOC, Sebastian Thrun, Udacity

A Day in the Life of the Future (Online) College Student

July 24, 2012 | 10:38 AM | By

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By Jill Rooney

What does the future look like for online college students? With the explosion of massive open online courses (MOOCs) — including today’s announcement of U.C. Berkeley joining edX, and Coursera adding courses from 12 universities, including CalTech and Duke — the one fact we can say for certain is that online higher education is here to stay.

These are not just big names being added together: the numbers also tell the story. More than 6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2010 term, according to a Babson survey [PDF] for the Sloan Consortium.

While some wonder whether this is the end of traditional higher education, others are considering what an average college student’s life will be like in the future. In his Atlantic article Selling the College Experience to Students Who Take Classes Online, Conor Friedersdorf imagines a future in which savvy colleges and universities take advantage of new technologies to expand their operations across the country through virtual branches. Theoretically, these branches would offer some physical locations, where elite colleges could “leverage a respected brand into a profitable events business.”

He provides a description of “Yale West,” in which students in southern California could take advantage of networking possibilities such as “the monthly cocktail hour at the Soho House in West Hollywood, the group surfing lessons offered each summer in Huntington Beach, the ongoing Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Coursera, edX, MOOC

Can Free, High-Quality Education Get You A Job?

June 12, 2012 | 11:46 AM | By

Flickr:M.Keefe

By Katrina Schwartz

The sudden growth of free, top-shelf online education sites has the potential to democratize high-caliber education that’s long been reserved for only those who could afford it.

But as these new sites begin to blaze a new path to the possibility of a level playing field, it’s still unclear whether taking courses in subjects like artificial intelligence or game theory will eventually lead to employment.

Are certificates of online course completion from venerable institutions viable substitutes for diplomas and degrees from the same brick-and-mortar four-year universities? Though professors who teach these Massive Open Online Courses are well respected in their fields, is their stamp of approval enough to land a job?

If any job market would be receptive to a non-traditional educational path, one might think it would be Silicon Valley. There are plenty of examples of tech tycoons like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg who dropped out of school or otherwise bucked the system only to become wildly successful. It’s a hub that values creativity and technical skills and might seem a likely environment where a company might be willing to hire a person on the basis of their knowledge rather than where where they got their degree.

“A college degree is very fundamental — a weeding out process.”

If that’s somewhere on the horizon, it’s not necessarily happening yet. When contacted about these online education sites — courses taught by professors at MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley — many companies directly refused to talk about how their human resources departments would view a non-traditional candidate. Many had never even heard of Coursera, edX, or Udacity.

But recruiters who did agree to go on the record said that, for the most part, companies big and small looking for computer engineers want employees with college degrees from schools known for their computer science programs. “I couldn’t personally help them,” said Robert Greene, founder of technical recruiting firm GreeneSearch, when he heard the profile of a potential job Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Coursera, employment, Higher Education, MITx, MOOC, Stanford, Udacity

Guide to MOOCs: Free, Quality Higher Education

May 14, 2012 | 1:41 PM | By
By Katrina Schwartz

As the current generation of college graduates wrangles with an unprecedented amount of debt, a sea change is underway in higher education. More and more elite universities are offering free online courses that might characterize the next iteration of the college experience for the forthcoming generation of students.

Will students be able to receive the equivalent of a bachelors degree for free? How will brick-and-mortar institutions be used in the future? Will academic rigor suffer? How will credentials or tuition apply to those who come to campus and those who complete courses online?

At the moment, students of these online courses receive certificates of completion, but no university credit. But the movement is still in major flux as we speak, as day by day, yet another development in free online education is announced. What started 11 years ago with MIT’s OpenCourseWare — the syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and event video lectures from more than 2,000 MIT courses — has amassed into an explosive Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, Coursera, Harvard, Higher Education, Minerva, MIT, MITx, MOOC, Open Source, Stanford, Udacity