Serendipity35

Going back all the way to the early days of MOOCs (less than a decade, of course), the Open part of Massive Open Online Courses was a very important part of the equation. OPEN meant a number of things, including:
Access - open to all, regardless of age, location or previous experience and education
Free - without cost
Open Tools - using free and open tools like Moodle, blogs etc.
Reuse – the right to reuse the content in its unaltered / verbatim form
Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself
Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new
Redistribute – the right to make and share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others.

That is not true for many of the big MOOC providers. Another blow against the Open Everything Empire comes with the announcement that Udacity will no longer give learners the opportunity to earn free, “non-identity-verified” certificates. People will still be able to view Udacity’s online course materials without paying, but those who want a credential will have to pay. Udacity feels their courses are worth something and plans to charge students accordingly. Udacity had earlier pulled back on believing that MOOCs are best-suited for academic pursuits and better applied to training and lifelong learning. That is what many universities consider to be "non-credit" courses.

How long before the courses are not even open to those who aren't willing to pay to learn?

The big MOOC providers already tend not to use open source platforms and most don't allow the courses to be remixed, reused or redistributed.

The openness is eroding.
 

 

Facebook - not the first name that comes to mind when you think of open source - has announced that it hopes to bring more open source to computer science curricula.

Open Academy (OA) is a program designed to
provide a practical, applied software engineering experience as part of a
university student’s CS education. The program works with key
faculty members at top CS universities to launch a course that matches
students with active open source projects and mentors and allows them to
receive academic credit for their contributions to the open source code
base.

Students and mentors from open source projects come together at the start of the semester for a weekend of learning and hacking, and then return to their universities and continue to work in virtual teams. Open source mentors support their teams by helping students find and understand tasks and review code contributions. The course instructors at each university meet with student teams at regular intervals to review progress. Some instructors overlay a lecture series to provide further learning opportunities to students.

OA was piloted at Stanford in 2012 and expanded in 2013 to include MIT, University of Texas at Austin, Cornell Univeristy, University of Toronto, Waterloo University, University of Singapore, University of Tokyo, Imperial College of London, Jagiellonian University, University of Helsinki, and Tampere University of Technology and has now expanded to the University of Pennsylvania, UC San Diego, Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley , Purdue, University of Warsaw, UIUC, UCLA, and University of Washington.  

The winter 2014 course will officially begin in early February when all of the participating faculty, students, and open source mentors from around the world fly to Facebook's headquarters for a three-day kickoff event.

https://www.facebook.com/OpenAcademyProgram

At the recent OCW Consortium meeting in Bali, Indonesia, awards were given in two categories of open courses – text-based and multimedia.

Text based courses include written materials for the course, including lecture notes, assessments, syllabi, calendars and readings.

Multimedia courses also include video, audio or other type of multimedia presentation of materials.

These courses are produced in a variety of languages and developed by institutions committed to increasing access to high quality higher education for everyone.

America certainly does not dominate the winners.

2013 Course winners – text based courses:

·       An American Constitutional History Course for Non American Students, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
·       Delft Design Guide, Delft University of Technology
·       Atomic Physics, African Virtual University
·       Fisiología Humana, Universidad de Cantabria
·       Conocimientos Básicos de Matemáticas para Primeros Cursos Universitarios, Universidad de Zaragoza

2013 Course winners – multimedia courses:

·       Thermal and Statistical Physics, National Tsing Hua University Opencourseware
·       Productos de apoyo y tecnologías de la información y las telecomunicaciones, UNED: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
·       Basic Arithmetic, Scottsdale Community College
·       Developmental Math, The NROC Project
·       Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I, Delft University of Technology

Saylor.org, a longtime member of the open education community, announced a new K12 program of open online courses.

The academic courses are aligned to the Common Core State Standards and use open educational resources (OER) extensively, making the courses, as well as their contents, widely reusable by students, teachers, and parents nationwide.

The list of the K12 courses also suggests ways to use and reuse the courses.

Teachers can flip their classroom without shooting thei own videos and incorporate more engaging digital content into classes.

Schools can get current, Common Core-aligned materials for free.

Parents can provide extra resources to supplement what kids learn in school and accelerate or review subjects. It offers a self-contained curriculum for home school families.

And, on their own, students can do more challenging work or subjects their school might not offer. It will give you experience in learning in a different way and acclimate to an online learning environment which is common in colleges.  You can also review material you learned in school and go further and prepare for your SATs/college.


(And I made it through this entire post without once saying "MOOC.")