by ANDREA A. LUNSFORD, BedfordsMartins
Mow do you make a course with 300,000 students enrolled in any way intimate? How do you foster give-and-take among the participants? How do you avoid rampant cheating? And perhaps most vexing, how do you evaluate the work of students in such courses, especially ones that don’t lend themselves to multiple choice scantron tests. Colleagues across the country who are working on MOOCs are quick to say that they don’t know much about what they are doing and that experimentation is the name of the game—for the near future at least. The excitement and promise of MOOCs are very real: stories of people with no access to formal education suddenly being able to take courses from the best faculty in the world are heartwarming, as they signal an opening up and democratization of education scarcely imaginable in earlier times. But the problems, some of which I’ve just enumerated, are also very real. In addition, the nation’s most prestigious institutions aren’t likely to trade in that prestige any time soon.
http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/andrea-lunsford/moocs-to-you/alunsford/
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