What on-campus students may be able to learn from MOOC students
Gregor Kiczales, a computer science professor at UBC who teaches the Introduction to Systematic Program Design MOOC, discusses his experience with incorporating MOOC materials back into his UBC course in order to try to improve the on-campus course.
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UC Davis’s digital badge system
The University of California at Davis has created a digital badge system for the university's sustainable agriculture program.
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The launch of the TOOC (Truly Open Online Course) at the University of Saskatchewan
The University of Saskatchewan will launch its first open online course, Introduction to Learning Technologies, on January 21, 2014.
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BCcampus launches phase three of the Open Textbook project: Creation of new text
The BC Open Textbook Program, which is coordinated by BCcampus, has announced a new call for proposals from British Columbia faculty interesting in creating new open textbooks to round out their list of 40 highest-enrolled subject areas.
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Creative Commons’ next generation licenses – what’s new in version 4.0
Creative Commons (CC) recently launched a new version of their copyright license suite which allows creators "to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients."
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Obama is advised to let market forces decide fate of MOOCs
The United States President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology recently published a letter to the president in which they state that MOOCs can help increase access to higher education while driving down its costs, but the government should not intervene in order to push the MOOC movement in that direction.
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EdX drops plans to connect MOOC students with employers
After a failed pilot, edX has decided that it will not be using on job-placement services as a revenue model.
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Massive, open, and course design
Michael Feldstein examines how MOOCs explode the assumption that the goal of a course "is to be able to certify that students in the class have learned a well-defined set of knowledge and skills."
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Redefining MOOC completion rates
Martin Weller returns to the discussion on MOOC completion rates, suggesting that "taking MOOC enrollment figures to be the number who signed up for a MOOC even if they never come in to it is always going to give harsh figures.
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Four types of MOOC research
Justin Reich, a HarvardX Research Fellow, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and a lecturer in the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program, describes four categories of MOOC research: "Fishing Expeditions in the Exhaust," in which researchers report the observations from MOOCs clickstream data; "Experiments in the Periphery," in which experiments are only conducted on the periphery of courses, du to the disconnect between course teams and researchers; "MOOC-thropology in the Field," qualitative research through interviews, field observations, screencasts, and content analyses of forums and other peer-production environments; and finally "Design Research in the Core," in which faculty, course development teams, and researchers work closely together to design courses that have important and interesting questions built into the architecture of the course.
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