Massive Open Online Classrooms (MOOCs) made headlines in the New York Times again. Harvard University’s own venture into MOOC-space, edX, is mentioned, along with the usual suspects, Coursesara and Udacity.
A couple highlights from the article:
- The challenges inherit in widening a traditional classroom to a global audience are breathing new life into the art of teaching and learning. Professors are finding that they need to reshape and rethink their instructional approach when teaching tens of thousands of virtual students.
- These challenges will be overcome with the help of the students themselves. For example, the crowd-sourcing of moderating discussion forums and of grading via peer-to-peer evaluation is becoming critical to running a MOOC.
- Peer-to-peer evaluation of assignments, such as essays, is permitting the MOOC to go beyond computer science and engineering, which were suited to automated, computer grading. Humanities courses are starting to jump aboard.
- There is, of course, still much to learn, especially about how well students learn in a MOOC. MOOC-space is young, wild, and untamed.