Don’t want to be replaced by video lecturers? Up your game.

MOOC Wordle

MOOC cowPhilosophy professors at a public California University have spurned an offer to be replaced by online courses which are part of the edX initiative to offer lectures from Harvard, MIT and other top-level colleges to students at other universities in the form of video clips delivered on line. The San Jose State University professors point out in a public letter that the drive to cut education costs by replacing hands-on teaching with film clips constitutes a gross degradation of the educational experience their students will receive; that video teaching isn’t half as good mind fodder as reading a textbook is; and that it would be crazy for them to passively agree that a video lecture can teach students better than themselves, as real life professors, can. read more

Online Learning, Free Classes and MOOCs

MOOCs

  • Coursera offers free online courses and certificate courses you pay a fee to get
  • Distance Ed Archive Collection curated by George Brett
    Topics related to distance eLearning in academia and other organizations.
  • EdX
    EdX offers interactive online classes and MOOCs from the world’s best universities. Online courses from MITx, HarvardX, BerkeleyX, UTx and many other universities. EdX is a non-profit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT.
  • Harvard offers a variety of free online courses.
  • MIT OpenCourseware. Basically, MIT gives you last year’s course lectures totally for free. If you want this year’s courses and access to professors, you need to attend the school.
  • Udemy has a variety of free and low cost courses. Offers change so check in once in a while to see if you can catch what you want at a good price or for free.
  • read more

    Self learning beats a “degrading” educational system

    TED features a MOOC project this week

    Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan developed a curriculum for their students to build a computer, piece by piece. When they put the course online — giving away the tools, simulators, chip specifications and other building blocks — they were surprised that thousands jumped at the opportunity to learn, working independently as well as organizing their own classes in the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). A call to forget about grades and tap into the self-motivation to learn. read more