Serendipity35

A recent article titled "What Do Forbes, NYT, And Sotheby’s Have In Common? They Make Online Courses" states that "There are now a number of non-education-focused organizations and individuals offering MOOCs on the major platforms." They use as examples World Bank, PwC, and Fundação Lemann offerings on Coursera, and Microsoft, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, and the Inter-American Development Bank courses on edX. Google offers an Android Basics Nanodegree on Udacity. These are massive online courses, but are they MOOCs?

With a few exceptions, many of these courses are more MOC than MOOC. It is accidentally appropriate that the former can be pronounced "mock" as in "not authentic or real, but without the intention to deceive." 

The "O" that is missing is OPEN.

Clearly those corporate offerings are "Courses" and are "Online." The definition of "Massive" varies. Certainly we mean much larger than a face-to-face class (which could have several hundred in a lecture hall) or a traditional online course. I would probably say 1000 to 100,000 students is massive (and there are examples that exceed 100K). 

For me, the "Open" part of the MOOC is the most important part. I guess I am a purist and having taught and taken MOOCs even before the acronym came in common usage, I cling to that original vision. 

I was a learner and facilitator (student and teacher seem inaccurate) in courses offered by Peer to Peer University p2pu.org   which began in 2009 as a community-centered project. It uses a volunteer network and governance model. 

They champion openness which enables participation, replication, and accountability. We strive to use openly-licensed learning materials and always share our methodology and resources openly, so that as many people as possible can take leverage our work.

Openness in a MOOC means four things to me. It is open to everyone - no prerequisites - and access to the resources (videos, notes, documents, images etc.) should be free of cost (but other things, like being able to ask direct questions to the teacher, the correction of the activities, or obtaining a certificate, grade or credit at the end of the course may have an economic cost). Open also often means that it does not make use of a closed learning platform (LMS). The resources might be hosted, as they were in the earliest MOOCs, in different places like websites, blogs, wikis, or multimedia repositories. Open should also mean that the course tries as much as possible to use open content, and it is offered with the intent that it can be reused by others.

These qualities of openness are certainly not true of the vast majority of things offered today as a MOOC . What I will call a MOC is what the most successful companies, such as Coursera or Udacity, are offering.

Profit is not always an ugly word. Let them make a profit if they can. And, yes, they do still offer some course free of cost, but let us not call them "open."

Things have evolved quite a ways from the "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" course created by educators Stephen Downes and George Siemens. When they offered free access to their for-credit course at the University of Manitoba, Canada, it got tagged a the first MOOC. Their course is still there, but a lot has changed.

Google has been getting deeper into education, particularly into higher education. For example, their interest in creating a technically skilled, innovative and diverse workforce has moved them into computer science (CS) education.

That is a logical path for the company and they are interested in developing programs, resources, tools and community partnerships which make CS engaging and accessible for all students.

In STEM generally, women and minorities are historically underrepresented and that's true for computer science at the post-secondary level. In the U.S., women and ethnic minorities each represent just 18% of computer science graduates.professional experience.

You would expect Google to have sophisticated analytics, and analytics in online education software is a key feature in an LMS today as a way to understand how students are doing in greater detail than is possible by trying to do it manually. Course Builder offers several built-in analytics that require little set-up and also options for creating custom analytics using Google Analytics and Google BigQuery. They do note that not everything is free - running either type of custom analytics counts against your App Engine quota and can incur costs.

Course Builder is part of their overall education strategy. Check these links for more information:

Open Line Education https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/  

Course Builder Features https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html

One feature is accessibility https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html#accessibility 

Peer Review https://www.google.com/edu/openonline/course-builder/docs/1.10/feature-list.html#peer-review

 

Coursera announced a shift in its business model this month that many people view as making their offerings less open and less like courses.

New courses in their Specializations category will require learners to either to pay up front for the first course in the Specialization or prepay for the entire program. In the past, you had the option to take it free with access to all the course materials but no certificate upon completion, or you could opt to pay ($49 at one time) for an identity-verified course certificate provided upon completion.

In the new model, the courses that charge up front (and that is not all of the courses they offer) still allow you to choose not to pay, but then you then are in the “explore” mode and have access to course materials (lectures, discussions, practice quizzes) but you are in a "read-only" mode for graded assignments. 

I don't see this as the end of the MOOC. A viable business model for companies to pay the bills of creating courses and maintaining the infrastructure has been inevitable since 2012 was named the "Year of the Mooc." For many learners, having access to the materials is all they really wanted anyway. As long as that option continues, I think these are still important educational options, even if the the open and course parts of MOOC may have been demoted to lower case o and c.

Udacity has gone farther and earlier down the path to paying for courses and developed a clear business model to work with companies and not function as an alternative university. Working with Google , their "Responsive Web Design Fundamentals" course (see video intro below) is an example of that approach. You can jump into that course and explore, but it is also part of Udacity's "Nanodegrees" which is comparable to Coursera's "specializations." 



 

"Google wants the artificial-intelligence software that drives the company’s Internet searches to become the standard platform for computer-science scholars in their own experiments.

On Monday, Google announced it would turn its machine-learning software, called TensorFlow, into open-source code, so anyone can use it.

“We hope this will let the machine-learning community — everyone from academic researchers, to engineers, to hobbyists — exchange ideas much more quickly, through working code rather than just research papers,” Google announced on its website.

Until now, researchers have had access to similar open-source software: Torch, built by researchers at New York University, as well as Caffe and Theano, are also open to everyone. TensorFlow is meant to combine the best of the three, Jeff Dean, a top engineer at Google, told Wired."

via http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/