Experiential eLearning

EdX and MOOCs

Harvard’s announcement this month that it was joining forces with MITx to launch EdX, a series of (free and paid) openly-available online courses, fueled an already buzzing trend in higher education:  MOOCs, or massively open online courses.   The move is being portrayed in a variety of ways – the promise of democratizing higher education and potentially disrupting, or at least fundamentally altering the structure and quality of, online learning and even face-to-face classroom education.   Here’s a look into the MOOC evolution and how EdX fits into the picture.

Identifying the "Job" for OER Repositories

For those not familiar with the Open Education movement or Open Education Repositories (OER), please see my earlier post on Open Education.  This entry applies Clay Christensen's theory of "jobs to do" marketing and explores some challenges and opportunities for OER repositories using that perspective. Both of these entries are based upon ongoing discussions in the Open Education Practice and Potential course in Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education, and I'm grateful to my classmates as well as instructors Brandon Muramatsu and Vijay Kumar for exploring these topics.

Open Education

I'm currently enrolled in a hybrid classroom/online course called Open Education Practice and Potential in Harvard University's Division of Continuing Education.  The course is taught by Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean and Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Office of Educational Innovation and Technology (bio) and Brandon Muramatsu, Senior IT Consultant in the same MIT office.  Both are incredibly accomplished learning technologists dedicated to the "Open Education" movement -- a movement aimed at improving education access and quality by enabling educators to develop, use, re-use, and share digital learning resources.  Although the class isn't over yet and I'm by no means fully educated on this expansive topic, I thought I'd make an attempt to describe this movement and detail just a few of its components that challenge the conventional educational content landscape.