'KIN Bloggin': MOOCs

Thursday, 14 March 2013

MOOCs

My daughter is currently completing her geography degree at Nottingham University. I was impressed at how much of her course material was available online, allowing her to study when suits her (ie when she gets out of bed or at 3:00am).

You may not have heard of MOOC, but Massively Open Online Courses are a phenomenon which gives everyone access to university learning, completely free.

www.coursera.org is a wonderful MOOC resource that uses this wealth of online material and offers it in the form of structured online courses, usually of 6-12 weeks. This is no second-rate resource; universities such as Stanford, Penn State, Duke, LSE and Insead all have offerings, with top course tutors and supplemented participant assignments, discussion forums and exams.

What a wonderful and novel way of sharing knowledge 'san frontiers'.

I'd like to sign-up for the Stanford University course in Organisational Analysis; I've asked if it will be re-run this year. I'm hoping that other KIN members will do it at the same time, so that we can learn together.

Coursera was kindly pointed out to me by KIN Associate Steve Dale, who has started a University of Michigan course in Organisational Network Analysis.

(Photo credit: AJC1)