Of MOOCs and Mousetraps - Karen Head, Chronicle of Higher Ed

Karen Head, a guest blogger for Wired Campus, is an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication, and director of the institute’s Communication Center. She reports periodically on her group’s efforts to develop and offer a massive open online course in freshman composition. Generally people approach new problems by beginning with what they already know, so early conversations are rooted in clichés about reinventing wheels or building better mousetraps. However, MOOCs aren’t like the existing structures we know—they are neither traditional lecture courses nor traditional distance-learning models. The “massive” component changes every aspect of what we are attempting to do and requires innovative approaches, especially for a course on freshman composition. With technologies evolving so rapidly, it is easy to overestimate the available tools, and we find that we may not be able to adapt our courses for massive audiences in all the ways we might like. http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/of-moocs-and-mousetraps/42487