MOOC the Online Teaching

Colleges and professors have rushed to try a new form of online teaching known as MOOC’s—short for "massive open online courses." The courses raise questions about the future of teaching, the value of a degree, and the effect technology will have on how colleges operate. Struggling to make sense of it all?

What are MOOC's?

MOOC's are classes that are taught online to large numbers of students, with minimal involvement by professors. Typically, students watch short video lectures and complete assignments that are graded either by machines or by other students. That way a lone professor can support a class with hundreds of thousands of participants.

Why all the hype?

Advocates of MOOC's have big ambitions, and that makes some college leaders nervous. They're especially worried about having to compete with free courses from some of the world’s most exclusive universities. Of course, we still don't know how much the courses will change the education landscape, and there are plenty of skeptics.

These are like Open Courseware projects, right?

Sort of. More than a decade ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started a much-touted project called OpenCourseWare, to make all of its course materials available free online. But most of those are text-only: lecture notes and the like. Several colleges now offer a few free courses in this way, but they typically haven't offered assignments or any way for people who follow along to prove that they've mastered the concepts. MOOC's attempt to add those elements

Who are the major players?

Several start-up companies are working with universities and professors to offer MOOC's. Meanwhile, some colleges are starting their own efforts, and some individual professors are offering their courses to the world. Right now four names are the ones to know:

edX

A nonprofit effort run jointly by MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley.

Leaders of the group say they intend to slowly add other university partners over time. edX plans to freely give away the software platform it is building to offer the free courses, so that anyone can use it to run MOOC’s.

Coursera

A for-profit company founded by two computer-science professors from Stanford.

The company’s model is to sign contracts with colleges that agree to use the platform to offer free courses and to get a percentage of any revenue. More than a dozen high-profile institutions, including Princeton and the U. of Virginia, have joined.

Udacity

Another for-profit company founded by a Stanford computer-science professor The company, which works with individual professors rather than institutions, has attracted a range of well-known scholars. Unlike other providers of MOOC’s, it has said it will focus all of its courses on computer science and related fields.

Khan Academy

A non-profit organization founded by MIT and Harvard graduate Salman Khan.

Khan Academy began in 2006 as an online library of short instructional videos that Mr. Khan made for his cousins. The library—which has received financial backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google, as well as from individuals—now hosts more than 3,000 videos on YouTube. Khan Academy does not provide content from universities, but it does offer automated practice exercises, and it recently debuted a curriculum of computer science courses. Much of the content is geared toward secondary-education students.

Udemy

A for-profit platform that lets anyone set up a course.

The company encourages its instructors to charge a small fee, with the revenue split between instructor and company. Authors themselves, more than a few of them with no academic affiliation, teach many of the courses.

What’s in the Cloud?

There are a variety of cloud-based services in the library world. The most obvious is cloud-based access to a library’s book and AV collections through the online catalog (OPAC) that is part of the library’s integrated library system (ILS). OPACs can be overlaid with cloud-based front ends or recommender systems to make them more user-friendly. Bibliocommons is an example of a cloud-based front end for public libraries that works in tandem with a variety of ILSs. Bibliocommons and competing offerings from other vendors not only replace the search and discovery functionality of the OPAC but can also replace some patron account-related tasks, such as placing holds, paying fines, and updating user profiles. Some also provide a discovery experience based on community-contributed content, such as user-generated tags and reviews. Discovery layers like Serials Solutions’ Summon, EBSCO’s EDS, Ex Libris’s Primo Central, and others are meant to access all of a library’s data silos, not just resources cataloged in the ILS. Such discovery layers can provide access to special collections in the institutional repository and to products hosted outside of the library. For example, scans of public domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository can be found via the discovery layer of its academic library partners.

If a library wants more than the discovery layer in the cloud, library technology vendors including Innovative Interfaces and OCLC have either implemented or are in the process of launching completely new ILSs in the cloud, and open source providers, such as ByWater Solutions, can deliver cloud-based hosting services for the Koha ILS.

Electronic resources can also be made available through extramural repositories. Google Scholar incorporates metadata from journal indexes, article repositories, and other sources to offer web-scale access to scholarship that can be accessed at a patron’s library of choice. OverDrive, the most popular library ebook vendor, works with public and academic libraries and is making strides to integrate seamlessly with online library systems. 3M’s new ebook service, unveiled last year, permits users to sync their reading on multiple devices but still requires an initial download of the entire ebook file (that is, patrons don’t read a streaming book but a downloaded one).

Citation management software in the cloud can double as a platform for sharing content, forming communities around research topics, and recommending resources. Mendeley, for example, offers citation management through a web browser, though, to be fully functional, users need to download a client to their local computer.

New services may offer innovative approaches to managing scholarly communication electronically. Third Iron will let academic researchers browse and save new journal content through a service called BrowZine, available for the iPad.

MORE USES

Other services and products may also be of interest. Mobile phone apps can add value to cloud-based library data. OCLC’s WorldCat mobile site aims to direct patrons to the closest library owning a certain book by mashing-up data from WorldCat holdings, library locations, and user locations. StackMap shelf-mapping software is a new service that allows libraries to show users a map of the book’s physical location in the library based on a prerecorded call number range. Unlike radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips, which potentially allow for real-time search of a book via location tracking, this service is less dynamic but nonetheless useful.

Lastly, backups to the cloud can protect all kinds of library data—from repository contents to blog posts—from loss owing to fire, flood, local power blackouts, or other natural or computer-related disasters that could cause data to disappear. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform is a cloud service in the technologist’s sense of the term: it is scalable, metered, dynamic, and completely hosted by the bookselling giant. Libraries with technology staff can
use EC2 to implement virtual servers.