Connected Learning
From blogs.ubc.ca/etec522/Sept13
Week 12: Connected Learning
Comment by davidp 10:41 am on November 22, 2013
RE. “Thrun clearly sees himself as a first rate educator in the context of academia, but appears to have become impatient with students outside of his experience or understanding.”
There were some pretty salty tweets about this very point last week.
Two alternative MOOC-like approaches emerging that may be better tuned to open development than the current brand of xMOOCs:
University of the People –> http://www.uopeople.org
How University of the People supports students in the developing world
OER University –> http://oeruniversity.org
Comment by jiorns 8:28 am on November 24, 2013
I checked out OER University and University of the People.
OER University seems rather like most MOOCs offering higher-ed courses where tuition is free but certification has a cost. The partners to OER University are universities and polytechnics from a number of English-speaking countries, so it has strong support. Very nice interface too.
University of the People claims to be a not-for profit and tuition free university. Its backers are UNESCO and other UN organisations together with some universities like NYU and corporates like HP and Microsoft. But there is a business model to keep it running and therefore fees are attached to processing of applications and processing of exams. A donor system potentially support students who can’t meet the fees.
What is interesting to me is that U of the P has commercial partners and missing from the list are the mobile phone providers/telecom carriers.
Comment by davidp 8:41 am on November 24, 2013
All good points. There has to be a business model, for sure.
OERu is built on the notion of free courses (built on OER) leading to recognized credentials, with students having to pay for either challenge exams or prior learning assessments. It’s MOOC-like in its delivery format, but perhaps unique in offering recognized credentials as a differentiator.
Another differentiator for OERu is that it does all its planning in the “open,” completely transparently. Not many organizations could make that claim.
Take a look at http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/Home
The point about alliances with mobile/telecom providers might be a business model that some startups in this space will pursue. Actually a bit surprising nobody has done it with any of the tablet vendors.
