“Learners are classified based on their patterns of interaction with video lectures and assessments, the primary features of most MOOCs to date.”—Rene F. Kizilcec, et al. [http://www.stanford.edu/~cpiech/bio/

For those who follow the MOOC debate, every day is Armageddon:The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities [http://www.amazon.com/Last-Professors-Corporate-University-Humanities/dp/0823228606] , “The Year of

From all the jails the Boys and Girls Ecstatically leap— Beloved only Afternoon That Prison doesn’t keep They storm the Earth and stun the Air, A Mob of solid Bliss— Alas—that

As some are raised a Catholic or an atheist or a vegetarian, I was raised an academic. The university always had about it a mystique, a cloud of mystery and veneration. Lauded in

Victorian hubris opined, “All that can be invented has been invented [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell],” and so we entered the 20th century emboldened with a Titanic which was unsinkable,

When faced with a complex, fluid, and potentially uncontrollable situation, I’ve often heard people say, “It’s like herding cats.” I can think of no more complex, variable, and fluid task than

Every fall when I ask my first year students, “Why did you choose theCollege of Environmental Science and Forestry [http://www.esf.edu/]?” at least one will answer, “I want to save the

A MOOC is not a thing. A MOOC is a strategy. What we say about MOOCs cannot possibly contain their drama, banality, incessance, and proliferation. The MOOC is a variant beast — placental, emergent,

This sentence is a learning object. Wayne Hodgins, the “father of learning objects,” first came up with the idea for them while watching his son play with LEGOs. The basic notion is that

How different would our education system be if we focused on learning for learning’s sake, rather than for the sake of tests, exams, and homework checks — if performance really mattered?

MOOCs: Changing Modes of Pedagogy[original Google Doc [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u1KUIi4l_iyxdkSNPlRiV3C84SYjXxfQbf80-iE2RiU/edit] ] AsBonnie Stewart [http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2012/08/10/if-foucault-ran-a-mooc/]explains, massive open courses are not

Coursera [http://www.coursera.org/]is silly. Educational technology news has been all a-flutter over the last few months about the work that Coursera is doing to bring higher education into the open.

MOOCs are a red herring. The MOOC didn’t appear last week, out of a void, vacuum-packed. The MOOC hasbeen around for years [http://mooc.ca/], biding its time. Still, the recent furor