MOOCs are moving into the mainstream and I’m signing up again
If you’ve not heard of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) then take a look at What you need to know about MOOCs
I signed up for the change11 MOOC last year but got no further than creating the blog to record my progress (the equivalent of buying a new notebook I guess). I forget why I never gave it a real go but it was definitely down to my other preoccupations rather than being anything to do with the course itself.
I’ve just created another course blog* course blog, this time for the 9-week Coursera / Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction course. It’s a subject area that fascinates me but I’m equally interested in experiencing the MOOC format. Of the various MOOC providers, I read (I forget where) that Coursera have pretty much been replicating conventional teaching rather than doing things differently or innovatively. However the HCI course looks set to make heavy use of peer assesment so perhaps that’s unfair.
Assuming I get beyond opening my notebook, I’ll be tracking & commenting the course on my HCI 2012 Course Blog* HCI12 Course blog.
In the run-up to the course I’ve been doing some reading around MOOCs (rather than HCI!):
- Seb Schmoller’s detailed and excellent commentary on his participation in last year’s Artificial Intelligence course (Also from Stanford, but prior to Coursera / Udacity break-aways).
- On the Guardian HE Network, Is MOOC more than just a buzzword?
- Several MOOC-related posts from serial participant Alan Cann.
- Challenges in developing a MOOC at University of Edinburgh (for Coursera).
- Posts by Martin Weller starting with Give Me An M!
*I have moved my course blog from Tumblr to WordPress as I’ve discovered the tags on Tumblr blogs are global not blog-specific
Image: The Cow by foreverdigital on Flickr
