It has been suggested that, with care and dedication, you can assemble a Masters of Business Administration for free. Perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the know, the idea hasn’t caught on. When leading…
Getting practice in early.
Online learning via Syda Productions/Shutterstock
Online learning has been around for more than 30 years, but recent excitement around Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has brought it fully into the public eye. In schools, online learning used to be…
Human-centred leraning, a thing of the past?
Professor via Olly/Shutterstock
In the mid-1980s as a further education lecturer I was mocked by some more traditional colleagues for using “lantern slides”, their term for the then newfangled technology of the overhead projector, or…
Over the past couple of years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have taken the academic world by storm. Despite much debate about whether the idea of running free online courses for everyone is both…
Technology has now reached a point where it is conceivable that an education experience on the internet can be comparable to one on a university campus.
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With technology changing the landscape of higher education, The Conversation this week is running a series “Re-imagining the Campus” on the future of campus learning. Here, Jason Lodge ponders the future…
Students in the UK are now paying annual fees of up to £9,000 – and they expect more for their money. This is a radical change from the situation a couple of decades ago when student grants provided the…
Patrick Dunleavy, London School of Economics and Political Science
The social sciences can now be seen as substantial UK industry, worth £23.4bn a year in broad economic terms according to my research. But subjects such as politics, economics, business, law and sociology…
When your classroom is a global one, filled with well-informed online learners, they don’t cut you much slack. Hundreds of people pore over every element of your course, making well-informed and sometime…
Cyber-security takes more than cautious laptop ownership.
sridgway
To my amazement, the latest Eurobarometer survey on Cyber Security across Europe received very little attention in the UK, despite its quite revealing findings. The report shows in no uncertain terms that…
Udacity’s founder Sebastian Thrun has over-promised and under-delivered.
Flickr/jdlasica
The promise was simple, but the idea couldn’t have been bigger. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) would make courses from Harvard and MIT available free to anyone with an internet connection. The world’s…
Learning on the job could make a real difference to healthcare.
Tricia Wang
Universities are being shaken up by a new mode of learning. The world’s elite institutions are opening up courses so thousands of people can learn for free via their laptops, mobiles or tablets. And these…
Does it matter if most Massive Open Online Courses are in English?
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For many educators, the dream feels tantalisingly close: free, quality education for everyone in the world. The arrival of Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs led to predictions of a great new age of…
Will the hype around free high quality higher education last?
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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) draw a spectrum of responses. Should we be spruiking MOOCs? Spooked by MOOCs? Or hoping the hype will fade and the fad will pass? Most of us know the headlines. Free…
Massive Open Online Courses landed in the UK today with the launch of FutureLearn, a project led by the Open University and including around 20 universities from the UK, Monash University in Australia…
From massively open to really massively open.
oxyman
The entrance of Google into the Massive Open Online Courses market this week has the potential to reignite the spirit of openness that saw these alternative routes into higher education emerge in the first…
Deputy Associate Dean (Academic), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, School of Education, The University of Queensland