Posts tagged open education

Coursera & InnoCentive: Good match?

Coursera is one of the biggest (open) online education suppliers - with high quality courses in the arts, humanities, technology, and fundamental science.

Coursera (heart) InnoCentive

InnoCentive is one of the biggest ideagoras and offers a platform for organizations to crowdsource their scientific problems.

Letting hundreds of students think about real-world solutions (and have them peer-review those) is a win-win situation: students are more motivated to work on real problems, and companies get their hands on the top-rated solutions. 

Of course, InnoCentive can be any other ideagora or platform for freelance projects like Guru.com or just by including real-world problems.

Likewise, Coursera can be another online educational supplier like Udacity or a smaller one.

EdX Business model (by EdX CEO)

Through this Quora post, I came across an interview with the CEO of EdX, who, somewhere in the interview, explains his views on the business model.

Sramana: How does the money flow in all of this? Who is paying whom, and what are they paying for?

Anant Agarwal: We are a nonprofit, but we must be self-sustaining. At this point certificates are free, but we are exploring an option for paid certificates. Students need to pay to take exams at Pearson’s centers, and we should be able to get some of that fee to offset our costs. That is our equivalent of a B2C model.

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Just stumbled across this video I saw years ago, about the paradox of choice, freedom, and happiness. Makes me wonder, looking from my edu/learning perspective, the enormous choice of learning opportunities we have at our finger tips, does it increase our well-being? Or makes us lame? What does it mean for education? It emphasizes curation and sense-making, recommendation engines and filters. Within the open education paradigm, there still is (which btw is justified) still a strong focus on OER production and sharing. The next phase in open education will be focused on personalization, filtering, curation, and being able to make sense of this giant learning soup which is called the Internet.

Downes Future of Learning - A summary

Last week, in the train, I digested the 40 page report by Stephen Downes on the “Future of Online Learning” (original blog post, download PDF or Word here). He wrote similar report 10 years ago, which you can find here.

You can read the index and scroll through the embedded document below. Below it I have pointed out the stuff I find interesting…

Downes - Future of Online Learning 2008

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CCK08 kicks off!


Alright, cool stuff around the corner. Next week the Open and Free Online Course on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge will start. There are participants from all over the world, but very little from Asia or Africa (see map below)…


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An introductory presentation can be seen here. If you’re interested, please visit the course outline for weekly readings and discussion times. Pre-course activities are listed here. You will receive The Daily each morning (Mon-Fri) which will provide summary information on posts relating to this course, commentary, and additional learning resources. Even more info at the moodle forum, click on “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge”.

I hope I will make sufficient time for this course. Although the road will be bumpy, I put much confidence in George Siemens and Stephen Downes. George has organized numerous free online conferences, which were very educative and interesting. Stephen’s essays and ideas are usually very interesting as well. They have probably put together a great learning experience.

If you’re in, have fun, if not, not. 

Final Thesis Report: Future of Delft Open Courseware

Finally, I did it. I finished my thesis on the Future of Delft Open Courseware. My grade was an 8 (out of 10), and I am very pleased with this result. I hope the report can and will be used not only by my university, but that it can help other institutes that are currently involved in Open Courseware or Open Educational Resources as well. I will present a paper about this research at ED-Media in Vienna in June.

Enjoy,
T

link to report