Obama's Free Online Course Initiative

Looking for your thoughts about the $500 Million ($50M per year for 10 years) that President Obama announced for the "creation of a new online open-source clearing house of courses" during his appearance at Macomb Community College on July 14, 2009. The relevant part of his speech is snipped and shown below.



There seem to be very few details about this project at this time. It seems like a reasonable strategy for experienced distance educators to try to provide some guidance for how this initiative is developed.

Please share your thoughts about how this should be crafted.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Barry, do you know of any projects where a combination of prior learning assessment and open source are being considered (credentialing models, etc.?)

I believe this is the way to recognize the varying ways we learn now, with so much online support.

Thanks

Elizabeth

ewellburn@Pinc.com
September 17, 2009 9:39 AM
Mike McNett said…
Barry,

My initial, gut, reaction is that whoever wrote this portion of the speech has a very murky and rudimentary understanding of what online learning is, how it works, and what resources are already available. Too many echoes of the scale-up-the-Great-Lectures model of OL learning for my comfort (or yours, obviously).

I have more questions than suggestions, so suggestions first.

Elizabeth raises a good point. I think a useful repository should have reusable assessment tools, as well as learning-objects—simulations, role-playing scenarios, application problems.

The whole enterprise would have to be governed by Creative Commons.

The contents of the repository should align with pedagogies that are appropriate for online learning (not to mention genuine learning on the ground)—collaborative learning, constructivism, problem-based learning. So no mega-libraries of multiple-choice questions and essay-writing prompts. (American textbook publishers have pretty well saturated that market anyway.)

And my questions—

How would the proposed repository differ from existing ones like Merlot and MIT OpenCourseWare? No sense in reinventing the wheel.

Is there a notion inherent somewhere in the Obama proposal of community (and 4-yr) colleges doing a sort of fast-and-dirty instructional design-and-development process in which a design staff distinct from the faculty Legos courses together from pieces found in the repository and then hires adjuncts to “run” the courses? I suspect there must be some administrators out there who could put that reading on it. That’s one potential Dark Side that I think has to be anticipated. (The Syllabus is not the course; the lectures are not the course;…..)

How will accreditation issues, both internal and transfer, be worked out for courses developed using repository components? Hell hath no fury like academic turf wars.

What happens ownership-wise if Creative Commons elements from a repository are used inside a course housed in a propriety CMS like BlackBorg?

And speaking of CMSes, should the contents of the repository be conceived as primarily compatible with the limited range of frameworks offered by the CMSes available on the market, or a primarily supporting personal learning environments and something comparable to mash-ups?

Given that the two examples given in the President’s speech are already commonplace, what might be some examples of as-yet-unimplemented uses which we could envision?

Mike McNett

Instructor, Making the Virtual Classroom a Reality, a program of the Illinois Online Network

Online English faculty, Oakton Community College
September 21, 2009 12:14 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow
Read more