So for the second year in a row, for the Class Central blog, I’ve posted a fictitious article on April Fool’s Day. Last year, it was making fun of Coursera, edX, and other MOOC providers by describing a shameless product they introduced to make money. This year’s was much more interesting. It posited that Michael Scott of ‘The Office’ (played by actor Steve Carrell) took MOOCs and was interviewed by […]
One of the recent trends I’ve seen in business over the past decade is an increasing reliance on “data”. You hear people talking about basing decisions on data, ‘crunching the numbers’, doing A/B testing, etc. This doesn’t guarantee being free from bias (indeed, flimsy rationalizations often cite ‘data’), but this is better than thinking that relying on our gut instincts is the best way to go. We’ve learned enough from […]
Amid the storm of controversy surrounding how MOOCs (massively open online courses, see a prior post here) will disrupt/enhance/destroy higher education, is a more basic question people ask is how suitable MOOCs are for teaching the humanities. It is true that most MOOCs have focused on science & technology subject areas, as many of the innovators are from the computer science department. Also, these subjects are fairly amenable to one-way […]
MOOCS – An Exciting New Trend in Learning MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) are a major recent trend in online education, and something that I’m very excited about. These are modeled on college-level classes taught by leading professors at elite universities–all for free and available online for anyone to take. The major providers are: Udacity (www.udacity.com), Coursera (www.coursera.com), and edX (www.edx.org), the first being for-profit and the latter two not-for […]
To Notice and to Learn