On Sat, Jul 27, 2013 at 9:06 PM, Anthony D'Costa <[email protected]>wrote:
> MOOC isn't a racket yet. It could be. I am ambivalent about it, skeptical > rather than a booster. Here my university is working with Coursera to offer > lectures on contemporary India via Nalanda University (a historical > university reinvented by the government of India along with international > partners, including the National Univ of Singapore). Amartya Sen, Sugata > Bose, and some of us are being drawn into this. I will be attending my > first Coursera meeting on Tuesday. Let us see what's in store. The > technical constraints are well recognized here as well. > There is some need for caution here: MOOC is a catch-all term and not all the players involved are equally sleazy. That being said, I do not have a very positive opinion of Coursera and Udacity, the two major for-profit players in this game. Daphne Koller, the principal behind Coursera likes to speak publicly with missionary zeal about bringing high quality educational content to poor Third World residents. But what is she telling her VC sponsors? Does she believe her own bullshit? She strikes me as being either really really naive or really really cynical. And here's Sebastian Thrun of Udacity making excuses for their most-recent debacle at San Jose State: "I am particularly surprised that certain outlets look at pass rates irrespective of student population. As if inner city high school kids are to fare as well as college students.” http://allthingsd.com/20130719/amid-controversy-udacitys-sebastian-thrun-is-relearning-how-to-teach/ I'd love to learn more about how your venture with Coursera works out. -raghu.
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
