eLearning Design & Delivery

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.

H20 Free Online Classroom Tools from Harvard’s Berkman Center

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is an “entrepreneurial nonprofit” whose mission is to “explore and understand cyberspace; to study its development, dynamics, norms, and standards; and to assess the need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.”  Basically, they study the relationship between the Internet, law, and society through a number of fascinating initiatives, many of which involve some of the celebrated intellectuals and authors in fellowship at the center.  Some of these initiatives involve tools that better enable educators to utilize, and be supported by, online and technology-based platforms.  We invited Kendra Albert, research assistant at the Berkman Center and assistant to noted Berkman steward and Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain, to visit with us at Harvard Business Publishing and give an overview of some of the free tools and platforms they’ve developed for education.

The Case for Custom Business Simulations

At Harvard Business School's Publishing group we've been a longtime fan of custom business simulations, and took thet custom development approach when we designed the platform and portfolio of our own business simulation games.  It's nice to see that the idea of creating custom simulations has only gained prominence in both academic and corporate settings.  BTS, a creator of experiential learning solutions for strategy implementation including custom business simulations, recently released a whitepaper called "Navigating Strategy Execution: The Case for Custom Business Simulations" (see their whitepaper page to download).  It's a great overview of the benefits that custom simulations can provide in corporate environments but also includes some great universal truths about the impact of this type of approach on learning.  We're heard great things about BTS and their approach and a few years back I had interviewed Executive VP Rommin Adl as part of an interview series on business simulations.  Check out the white paper - it's a great, short read and a nice synopsis of this great approach to experiential learning.