The Year of the MOOC?

This comment really belongs in the earlier thread (and is not an attempt at thread derailment ) but on the question of why tuition has gone up so much, one reason is the withdrawal of state government subsidies. Penn State University, for example, gets only five per cent of its revenue from the state government. It is just about a private university in all but name.

This trend has been widespread. Partly the cause has been state legislatures unwilling and/or unable to finance universities to the extend needed, but also universities have as a matter of strategy sought greater financial independence, which means more money directly from students,which means ever higher tuition fees.

I am not clear what problem MOOCs solve. In the first world at least, lack of materials is not and has not been for a long time the barrier to learning, so it’s not that. Is it a better means of learning than a book? Probably, for some things, but learning is costly in terms of time and effort and that’s going to be the bottleneck for most of us.

Credentials are, as you point out, key, but again “easy credentials” are not credentials worth having, so I can’t see where that takes us.

Which leaves the pile ’em really high and sell ’em really cheap model of education. I really hope MOOCs don’t become the second class education for those who can’t make it into the top grade.

Predictions are difficult of course, but I do know one thing. My son could not get into an overbooked undergraduate class a couple of years ago, and then received an email offering a place in an online version of the same class. We looked at each other, shook our heads, and he declined. There are a lot of higher ed teachers here: would recommend that your children sign up for an online version of an undergraduate course at your institution?

This is such an idiotic point to make but I’ll make it anyway because I need it refuted (so I won’t constantly think it): What is being missed about what people call ‘the traditional college experience’? I think you mention a lot of it–being induced to learn and what you might call training. We always had books and magazines and classic comics and x for dummies and graphic novels and films–We’ve had many, many tools for autodidacticism. Books have always been there. Records and correspondence courses and things have been there. What is so magical about these web based technologies that are supposed to be disruptive that they do something completely radical these other things like books and recordings and films don’t?

People still pay personal trainers to train them even though there are videos online.

You give some reasons to be skeptical that these technologies are genuinely disruptive of traditional higher education. I am very skeptical unless the goals and standards are drastically reduced in some kind of weird Orwellian universe where people can’t write or do higher math or physics.

Hi,

The lesson you are describing seems quite obvious: the Academy needs to step up its game to remain relevant. Well yes, so do the rest of us too, but most of us aren’t quite so good at faking it anymore.

Have a nice day,
Antti

I caught this link to a new paper on Baumol (and Bowen) effects on cost for higher ed at Marginal Revolution after the other thread closed, so I thought people might be interested:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2153122

SB @ 10 gave me visions (nightmares?) of academic gymnasiums, equipped with subscriptions to academic publications, multimedia centers and conference rooms, and scraggly PhD students offering one on one and group rate personal academic training…

*Yawn*

You don’t know anything about what I’m aware of.

@18

No, of course not, but my understanding grows substantially with each post you make.

the kids who take notes in lectures

Slight overstatement there – let’s say, “the kids who can be relied on to take notes in lectures and participate in seminar discussions and do the assigned readings are a minority”.

FWIW, I _never_ took notes in lectures (not that I attended many, sitting in the library always seemed like a better investment of time). No doubt some people benefit from transcribing what someone is saying to them; I found it got in the way of listening. As a teacher, I hate the fact that my off the cuff obiter dicta get transcribed and then woodenly reproduced in the end-of-year exam.

As a teacher, I hate the fact that my off the cuff obiter dicta get transcribed and then woodenly reproduced in the end-of-year exam.

M3 t00. But there’s note-taking and note-taking; I think at least having a pen in your hand and some paper in front of you is a good way to ward off the Glassy Stare of Vacancy. Which I prefer to seeing students actually talking, checking their phones etc, but not by much.

Phil @ 19: “You need to organise your teaching so as to make learning happen, even – or especially – for those students who don’t particularly want to learn.”

“Wanting to learn” is relative. I want to learn, but if you put me next to the aforementioned Ramanujan, I don’t look particularly motivated. Compared to when I was in (community) college, I’m also less motivated, because I have other worries, and other wants. I no longer have my sense of self tied up into having a stellar career, for one, and knowing everything has dropped a few points on the goals in life ranking, behind such things as caring for a son.

If you are perpetually motivated (which I wager many of you are, because it would sure help in becoming a successful academic) I can see why you would think it’s depressing that “students don’t really want to learn”. But students do want to learn – even the act of signing up for a MOOC is an indication of some desire to learn. And it’s really not something to be sad about that we can’t do it at the pace and self-directedness levels of the best full time students.

I suspect that the MOOCs may compete with the bottom end of the university spectrum and leave the top end almost entirely unaffected.

With all due caveats about how anecdotes don’t prove anything, my personal experience of a lower-tier British university about 10 years ago was largely negative. The lectures were given to very large classes and by lecturers who did not seem particularly engaged with either the subject matter or the students. They seemed to struggle to communicate the basic ideas clearly, let alone why we should care about what they were telling us (some seemed to struggle to communicate at all). There was no narrative or overarching structure to what we were learning – each module was self-contained and some of them were of dubious relevance to the stated aims of the course. I assume that they’re still running courses like this, and are charging kids nine grand a year for the privilege. (Of course, a large factor in my disappointing experience was my own attitude; I could have worked harder, been more engaged, and so forth. But I’m not stupid and I have a reasonable capacity for learning which the university did nothing much to appeal to, and I was in the lucky position of knowing a fair bit about the subject matter before I started.)

The degree I was studying for at the time was software engineering, and I’ve since come to the rather obvious conclusion that lower-tier universities are not especially good places to learn about this subject. However, this was the era of “education, education, education” and if you told someone that you were just going to read some books instead of going to university, they’d have looked at you rather as if you’d grown an extra head. But if you say you’re taking a course, possibly vaguely authored/curated by a professor from MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Cambridge/etc., and the whole thing was going to teach you more, faster, for an infinitesimal fraction of the cost, then you might find it rather easier to justify your position to your peers, parents and prospective employers. In my view, MOOCs exist largely to bridge some of the credibility gap between pure autodidactism and conventional university education.

Now, there’s still plenty of things a university education gives you that MOOCs don’t. Primarily, contact with other humans, and all of the informal knowledge that comes from knowing what makes people tick, what’s considered to be important or relevant within the field you’re studying, and how best to engage others in discussion of your chosen topic. Plenty of autodidacts know a lot of stuff, but lack the understanding of how to talk to others about it – they just don’t have the shared reference points, and if they lack self-confidence then they’ll find it very difficult to “sell” themselves to employers or even to other students as potential collaborators on some project or other. In software engineering a possible solution to this problem is the fact that the internet and blogs/StackOverflow/Quora/open source is a good way of displaying your knowledge and skills for others, and there’s generally a few good tech meetups in any decent-sized city which can provide an opportunity to actually talk to people about what you’re doing. Perhaps this is my ignorance showing, but I can’t see why something similar couldn’t work for much of the humanities; it clearly wouldn’t work for, say, medical students though.

What’s important here is the packaging of the MOOC though. Throw in some network of study groups where people can get their human contact and you’ve got something that is a very viable alternative to a low-end education that students can feel confident about adopting. From my point of view, I don’t see much to mourn in the passing of the bums-on-seats “education” that I received; if anything I’d hope it would encourage universities to find ways of improving the quality of education they provide, not least by eliminating the lazy option of having some nominal “course” in subjects like SE which is of minimal value to students but pays the bills.

I think the author of the article has identified the real issue regarding the capitalisation of knowledge offered by moocs. This is the role of mooc in the credentiality business.

Moocs can provide a great opportunity for a self employed web developer or someone who is trying to refine his knowledge on a certain subject.

But most of the people will always be employees and not employers. And employers will require some credentials.

Who would want to attend mooc college anyway?

I’ve found it telling that the MOOC success story that I’ve encountered far more than any other is a group of online computer science courses offered by Stanford. I don’t doubt its success, but people seem to forget that “continuing professional education” has been a thing in IT for about as long as IT has existed. The Stanford course seems to be essentially replacing those Teach Yourself X books that take up yards of shelf space in the computer section of Barnes & Noble. Additionally, all the people I’ve encountered who took one of the courses and liked it were adults with Bachelor’s degrees and a few years of professional experience.

It seems like a bit of a stretch to extrapolate from that and conclude that MOOCs can easily replace teaching Virgil to a bunch of 18 year olds.

Also, as one commenter pointed out in my last thread: we shouldn’t be stampeded by the newness of all this.

Cough. Open University. Cough. Which manages to be an excellent distance learning university. Though one that suits self-motivated learners.

SusanC @25 gets it exactly right (to use a locution from another site): lectures scale, feedback doesn’t. I haven’t taught the 500 student class that John alludes to, but I’ve taught 100 student classes and feedback is already failing at that level: tight rubrics for grading to keep some consistency between me and the TAs. It will be difficult for universities to claim that a MOOC is inequivalent to their existing large lecture classes: PSYC 101, SOC 101, PHIL 101, ECON 101 u.s.w. (the lab science classes where labs are coordinated with large lectures might be distinguished). This alone will be disruptive to universities’ (and departments’) budgets. Large lectures are cheap, particularly when staffed with adjuncts. The tuition paid for them covers the cost of the five student upper level seminar. If students can get credit for a (free) MOOC and not take (and not pay for) the large lecture, that cross-subsidy goes away. What replaces it?

it’s really not something to be sad about that we can’t do it at the pace and self-directedness levels of the best full time students.

It’s sad when we realise we’re directing our teaching at those pace and self-directedness levels, so that we’re not giving the rest of the class the chance to learn – so we end up either failing half the class or massaging the grades down-curve, neither of which is what we wanted to do. And it’s sad when we see kids messing around or zoning out and think “they were obviously motivated enough to turn up, so why can’t I get them to engage?”

The sadness is mostly self-criticism, really.

everyone who can spend time during the workday reading and commenting on CT and not get fired

Busted.

The Stanford course seems to be essentially replacing those Teach Yourself X books that take up yards of shelf space in the computer section of Barnes & Noble.

I’m not sure that’s entirely right. They seem to be the kinds of courses you’d do in your first couple of years at college. The kind of core knowledge that sadly most computer professionals (including many who have allegedly completed a college course in Computer Science) simply don’t have (the quality of Computer Science education generally seems to be quite low, and there’s way too much emphasis on ‘practical’ skills that you simply can’t teach well in a university).

Teach Yourself X books are really aimed at practitioners who have to switch languages/platforms for the Nth time in their career.

That said, I’m not sure how useful, or relevent, this is. There is really no shortage of excellent online resources on programming, plenty of opportunity to get practical experience, and for most areas such as networking/hardware/compilers there is usually a standard text book that will provide you with better info than any lecture. In fact I would say if there was an area that was already well served, it would be Computer Science. There’s a reason that Computer Science is filled with auto-didacts after all.

AcademicLurker @39,

This is not a rhetorical question: Do you have a link to anyone saying that MOOCs will replace the university for those students who were ever going to read Virgil in the first place?

I ask because I have spent a lot of the last month reading various criticism of MOOCs, which seems to fall into two camps — vacuous posturing (e.g. Mark Edmundson’s hand-wringing in the NY Times*) and blistering specificity (as with the Angry Math critique of Udacity’s Statistics 101 course.**)

There lots of people pointing out that a smart 18-year old with $250K and 4 years to invest isn’t going to sit in her basement watching videos and taking self-scoring tests when she could be reading the Aeneid in a bucolic setting. But I really haven’t seen anyone claiming that she would do such a thing in the first place.

Maybe there’s a bunch I’m missing, but I don’t think anyone is worrying about Duke and UVA getting too hard hit. It’s the ~4000 institutions that aren’t even on the US News list, and the millions of potential learners who are not potential US students who seem like the prospective losers and winners here.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-education.html?_r=0
** http://www.angrymath.com/2012/09/udacity-statistics-101.html

About that second link, the interesting thing about the Angry Math post is that Udacity responded the next day, saying Delta had made some good points, and that they would act to update the class accordingly.

Open systems are open; for people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes it seem like these systems are also terribly flawed. But as anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Encyclopedia Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, the ability to see and criticize flaws quickly can help those systems get better more quickly than their less-criticizable competition.

Years ago when I stumbled onto free online courses, I watched an Oxford professor give a guest lecture at Cambridge on the history of religious affiliated healthcare. It was entertaining, thought provoking and a key part of history. (Did you know that Jonathon Edwards’ medical writings were far and away his best selling books during his lifetime?)

Everything new gets over hyped, which is fine because it helps us shove all the possibilities through the winnowing process so that the unique benefits, comparative advantages and disadvantages can eventually be understood.

I’ve always had an affinity for lectures. I never took notes because I found that the process distracted me from directly absorbing the content. Now I have the best of both worlds, being able to repeat certain sections.

The bottom line is the every form of education will find its own constituency. The more content, the more forms of free and low cost available, the more mankind is advantaged.

Like JQ, I started my first coursera course recently. Essentially, it’s a “short-form” (aka watered-down) version of a course taught at a top school of public health in the U.S. The format is Skype lectures (from the Professor’s office, so it doesn’t give you the feel of a big lecture hall). Every 2-3 minutes there are “check questions” (T/F) to make sure you’ve absorbed the material. There’s a quiz (multiple choice) each week as well. Perhaps because of the newness of the material, I had great difficulty following the logical flow of the lectures and understanding what was really being asked in the quizzes. Many other students (esp. but not exclusively non-native speakers) requested sub-titles to the lectures (I think they’re going to post transcripts henceforth). There are several “student forums”, each with multiple discussion threads, the idea being I think that students will peer tutor one another. There’s also a paper which will be “peer assessed” (topic hasn’t been announced yet, presumably this will happen on the first day of the week it’s due). The schedule is tight (coursera is not a “work at your own pace” MOOC), and although the syllabus says “3-5 hours per week” are required, I think this refers only to the lectures/quizzes/following – even casually – the forums. My impression is that more like 10-12 hours are required to even begin to absorb the material. There are two coursebooks (not expensive, but not free – you had to order them in advance), plus some recommended websites, one of which isn’t updated very often. For those of us who don’t have access to any academic journals databases (e.g. Medline, for this particular course), locating academic bibliography is extremely difficult, often impossible.

That said, I’ve signed up for another course – if nothing else, I read two extremely interesting books, and numerous articles and studies that I was able to access. I won’t go for the “certifications” henceforth, however, only the knowledge. I see coursera as a chance to learn entirely new things, delve into subject fields I didn’t study at university but have since acquired at least a passing interest in, and keep myself mentally and intellectually active – all acceptable personal goals, but surely a very insignificant goal of coursera, perhaps merely an unintended side benefit.

And yet, none of them have made any measurable, or substantive, difference to teaching except in narrow areas.

This should read significant, rather than ‘any’. In education, there’s a long history of technology being over-hyped.

Cian #43,

There are examples on both sides. Movable type (the 1450 version, not the blogging tool) was a technology that had a pretty big effect on education, as has digital access to research materials, so the most we can say is that most technology has been integrated into the academy without much disruption most of the time. This means the odds are certainly on your side, but they are just good odds, and don’t come anywhere near your “no measurable difference” claim.

To you point #2, about measurement and rigor, I absolutely agree with this criticism, though the conversation around MOOCs also highlights the fact that many traditional models of education can’t answer these questions either.

To #3, I’m not sure how many people at Udacity have heard of Open University — likely far more at Coursera and especially EdX, for the obvious reasons. However, I’m not sure that matters much, as I’m not sure how much of what Open does is worth copying, and if the general message is just “Other people tried something like this, and it worked OK but not great”, I don’t think it would dissuade them, or even really interest them much.

Techies don’t really _have_ the story of “Other people tried this and it didn’t work” in their bones, because they live in a world of counter-examples: videoconferencing was a dud, and then there was Skype. Hypertext went from Vannevar Bush to Hypercard with only minor effect, and then Tim Berners-Lee gave it another shot, in another context, with another set of variables…

The people assuming that they can re-think education in a way that dramatically reconfigures it are probably wrong, just given the historical odds against revolution. But since there have been some revolutions that succeeded despite those odds, the people working on MOOCs et al are going to take the risk that they will be more like Gutenberg than Sarnoff.

And you’d be surprised at how many programmers use MOOCs (and related things like Codecademy.) It is, as Katherine @31 pointed out, part of the general culture of re-skilling (which culture I am betting becomes more general over the next several years.)

As for peer grading, though it came from the ‘train undergrads’ mental antibodies to recognize good from bad’ mold, the MOOC people are looking to it to gauge quality in a way roughly analogous to Larry and Sergey using multiple semi-reliable judgments about quality to create PageRank, and then Google.

And oops, my response to Cian was @49, not @43.

When I was an undergraduate I wanted to take far more courses than anyone could fit in 4 years. I’m thrilled that MOOCs might let me come back around to all those topics that caught my interest a decade ago but didn’t fit into my schedule. Yes, even without the MOOC I could just search Amazon for “Russian History” or “Molecular Biology,” but most textbooks are not complete tools for self-instruction, even if the reader has the nominal pre-requisites for a course that would use a certain textbook. Of course the MOOC itself isn’t a complete tool for self instruction: I’m not going to get my essays back with thoughtful marking and commentary, or do laboratory exercises with my laptop. But the MOOC looks like it can go further than previous aids for self-study, particularly if you’re simply curious rather than collecting credentials.

I don’t think that MOOCs have to remake or replace traditional higher education to be amazing and worthwhile, but most of the discussion is about about traditional higher education’s reaction. To put it another way: if we were discussing Internet telephony 10 years ago, would the discussion mostly be about all the people who won’t use it? About how it can’t replace a telephone contact number for employers, banks, utility companies, etc.? About how it could threaten public subsidies for traditional phone service in low-income households? Or, veering too far into optimism instead, about how AT&T and BT were going to go out of business in a few years and nobody would ever pay for voice communications again?

Harald Korneliussen #17:

“Also, I’m not a Ramanujan, most of us aren’t. We need feedback to feel confident enough to go on, . . . “

Even Ramanujan needed feedback, which is why he wrote letters out of the blue to foreign mathematicians asking for help. He did his best work not alone, but in close, face-to-face, collaboration with others. Also, it is worth noting that – contrary to the myth around him – his mathematical intuition, extraordinary though it was when it worked, was as often wrong as it was correct.

Lots of good points here, although it’s no surprise that the discussion is fragmented given what JH points out in the original post: “it is likely to be the bleeding edge of some disruptive wedge, I don’t know which one – several probably”.

I don’t think there is any doubt that MOOCs will gain significant usership, whether it’s Katherine’s reskilling, Matt’s supplemental courses, JQ and dbk’s curiosity-driven learning, or Clay Shirky’s large-scale second class education for those who can’t make it into the top grade. But that leaves several questions unanswered:

– Would the widespread adoption of MOOCs lead to a “democratization of learning”? I’d say no because of the credential issues and the status issues around education. I’m sure there will be many anecdotes of the general form “Jane was a dropout, at the end of her rope. Then she found a course on Coursera in [insert subject here] and now she’s a successful professional.” But such anecdotes will tell us nothing.

– Would the widespread adoption of MOOCs lead to a better educated populace, an educational golden age? Again, I’d say this is a fallacy of composition and the chances are slim. Lots of people go to the gym, but the spread of private health clubs to the populace has not produced and will not produce a healthier population. The relevant question is not “how useful is a MOOC to the individual learner” – which may have the answer “quite useful for a lot of people” – but “how do MOOCs reshape the educational landscape?”

Finally, any story that provides impressive sign-up figures up front and mentions large drop out rates in passing near the end, as the NYT story does, is a fluff piece.

And really finally, surely someone can find a better acronym than MOOC.

I think you’re at the same point I’ve been arguing for a while: MOOCs are in their best incarnation a digital reinvention of the instructional book, using all the affordances of online communication and digital media. Which is a great extension of the mission of higher education if successful. They’re not a substitute for focused classroom teaching, unless we’re talking the kind of industrialized teaching that very large research universities moved to far towards well before MOOCs or even the Internet appeared. (E.g., if by ‘classroom teaching’ one means a class of 1000 students in which a professor appears, lectures, and leaves and the rest is done by teaching assistants who have no say over the content or approach of the course, then a well-designed MOOC might well be close enough to compare.)

Clay, can I just say as an ex-professional programmer and now Interaction Designer that I find this kind of techno-lunacy embarrassing:

Techies don’t really _have_ the story of “Other people tried this and it didn’t work” in their bones, because they live in a world of counter-examples: videoconferencing was a dud, and then there was Skype.

For those of us with a working memory, the last fifteen years have been filled largely with over-hyped techologies/solutions (and and MOOC is a solution, not a technology) that failed to deliver, punctuated by the occasional success. The fact that your memory only seems to remember the survivors is not an argument. And videoconfering is still mostly not a thing, FWIW.

My problem with MOOCs is twofold:
1) It is being overhyped.
2) It is not particularly innovative.

First the hype. What this seems to be currently is a correspondance course updated for the online age. Well that’s a C19th phenomenon. The teaching company offers lectures by college professors to those who want to pay (or borrow them from their local library). And the OU of course offers a first class distance learning university education that is way more innovative than anything being offered here.

The fact that you single out IT is telling. Programmers are very motivated to keep up to date, it has always been a field where it was possible to self-teach and get a job and there are loads of very good online teaching resources out there (not to mention excellent books). Also programming is a field where you can easily learn on your own – there’s a strong online community (back in the day Usenet, today all the various mailing lists, forums, blogs, etc). Plus of course open source, which is an astonishing learning resource. So while more is good, its hard to see this as anything earthshattering in that field. Outside IT things become trickier, as programming is very well suited to online learning in a way that other things (chemistry for example) are less so.

Thirdly, Open University. Which is way ahead of anything being offered here, plus you get a real degree at the end of it.

Fourthly, the claims seem hyperbolic given that its mostly people who are either educated, or already motivated to keep learning (and programming is a field where that’s part of the culture – at least in comparison to most other fields). There’s no sign as of yet that this will reach those who don’t already have access to educational resources.

Fifthly, peer assessment. Please. Ever taught undergraduates?

And sixthly, the idea that somehow you can make credentialism somehow disappear is techno-utopianism at its most ludicrous.

Seventh, the big problem with students isn’t addressed by this model – they don’t want to learn for the most part. Sad but true.

Secondly the innovation.

There’s not a lot that I’ve seen other than very dated types of assessment (hey, AI assessment goes back to the late 70s, and its still yet to deliver anything very significant). Online communication is nice, but hardly innovative (hey, Open University). Delivery of lectures (which date back to when, the C13th) shows a remarkable lack of imagination (interestingly, the OU mostly uses documentaries to deliver their material, and has done for a long time). There seems to be little thought about how to address the most significant part of the university experience, the seminar, online.

Ongoing lifetime education is hardly a new thing. Long history of it in the UK (much of it at a working class level, interestingly), for example. It’s good, improving it would be good – but its not earth shattering either. I’m not sure this is better than the excellent Pelican books that Penguin used to publish. Or that the model scales better than something like the University of the Third Age.

I don’t have a problem with making universities more accessible, but I do have a problem with the hype and pretense. That somehow this is democratising education, is doubtful. That this will modernize the university is a claim that requires extraordinary evidence (as well a the counter-question, why this rather than the OU model which has been proven to work). If the hype is dialled down, and people have more realistic expectations (hey, you could learn some interesting stuff at the level of a popular science/history book) that would be great.

And when the people pushing something have a history of over-hyping stuff (hey Clay), and seem to be ignorant of prior history, it doesn’t bode well.

The danger is that by promoting MOOCs as reskilling and standard education as the making of an elite, we devalue the importance of having a public educated in the humanities. The problem isn’t with an educational elite: it’s arguing that the markers of such an elite are bad and shouldn’t be provided as a social entitlement.

In the US this shows up in the way we consider the provisioning of public education. Schools in areas with resources offer Latin. Schools without don’t, and there is a real suspicion that it takes time away from important things.

Something that increasingly bothers me is the failure to understand the simplest things. I was always surprised in the early days of the Web when a major corporation put up a webpage and failed to include a mailing address and a phone number. I find this still happening in other ways. For instance, #OWS is collaborating with 350.org and recovers.org on Hurricane Sandy relief efforts yet the link on http://interoccupy.net/occupysandy/ that points to 350.org is “404.” On 350.org, there was a link related to Hurricane Sandy which asked you to sign a petition and donate to the Red Cross but no link to OccupySandy or recovers.org.

Another example, for the last three years, I’ve been producing a weekly listing of public events at Harvard, MIT, other local colleges and universities, and other community venues on energy and other things (http://hubevents.blogspot.com). I did something similar for two and a half years in the mid-1990s. There are so many lectures, performances, showings, and panel discussions with great people that you could go crazy trying just to pick which ones to go to. This listing service a model that could be useful in any area where there are a number of schools that offer public events.

These opportunities to learn and to network, to collaborate and to develop together are almost infinitely available but what is not there is the simple recognition of that fact and the effort to link people and interests effectively.

MOOC’s will be a ten day wonder and buzzword but can serve a useful purpose. What I worry about is our habitual tendency to ignore the simple stuff that makes it easier for those who want to get together to connect.