There is a limit, however, to how much online and blended learning can scale while remaining true to an authentic course experience. No matter how well the multimedia, assessments, and peer learning opportunities are designed into a MOOC, the experience with 160,000 fellow learners (as in Stanford’s AI course) will never be comparable to a well designed traditional online, blended or face-to-face course. MOOCs may have many things to teach us about how to better design our traditional courses, and I’m hoping that we learn from data linking inputs (media, lectures, exercises, simulations, formative assessments etc) to outcomes (summative assessments and eventually even job performance). The large number of students in MOOCs and the availability of rich data around MOOC participants is an education researchers dream. But MOOCs alone will not solve our cost, access, or quality challenges in higher ed. They are as much substitutes for traditional courses (online, blended, or face-to-face), as Facebook is for real friends.

Read full article [here].
by Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Education.

Posted: July 18th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.