More #FutureofHigherEd & yet another #mooc

The future of higher education & other imponderables

as posted by George Siemens at elearnspace, June 16, 2012. I was going to ramble today or be more purposeful, issuing reminders and otherwise exhorting one and sundry (July 1 Stafford deadline, petitions, UNL's EDAD adjunct survey on evals, Duquesne, TAMUSA, etc). I may still do one or both, but this caught my eye and looked like something I could turn around much easier than the baggy monster sitting in drafts. I'm still deferring final posts for #change11 (digital identities, it's a wrap so what's the takeaway).

---

via OLDaily, hence the introduction by Stephen Downes, who writes...

George Siemens introduces the next open online course (aka MOOC though some people don't like the term) that we are participating in (by 'we' I mean George and myself, Dave Cormier and Bonnie Stewart, the Gates Foundation, EDUCAUSE, Desire2Learn, UBC, SOLAR, CETI, and a spare kitchen sink we found by the roadside). It will be short and intense, quite unlike our previous effort. 

George writes, 

"Today, the university as a system is under the microscope. It is now the entity that we no longer understand. We need to adopt a researcher’s mindset in coming to understand what is happening to higher education and what type of system today’s society needs." 

Everyone wants disruptive change, he writes, which isn't going to appen in such a large and entrenched system. Maybe so. But for my part, I do intend to be disruptive, and to let the change fall where it may.

Read the post. If currently engaged in (or enraged by) discussion of moocs, consider signing up whether as active participant or by-stander. You might want to browse presenters blogs in addition to the usual suspects rounded up by higher ed media. Or, just for fun, try a few random blog searches. Don't skip reading the critics (More or Less Bunk & others) and those undecided or with questions/reservations (Connection not Content, Martin Weller ~ more here, Connectiv et altria). 


In "Enough with Efficiency," which references moocs, Lee Bessette (@readywriting) writes, 

That for-profit start-ups are pushing a holistic form of evaluating a student’s knowledge and skills, not to mention embracing the variety of ways a student can acquire that knowledge and skill, and higher education is being pushed increasingly towards standardization requires such a degree of cognitive dissonance

... and much more (including thoughts on assessment, not forgetting the humanities and pushing back). Such is the challenge of navigating chaos.