We know how to operate in different timezones. Set a clock, add or subtract X amount of hours from your local time and do business. But what about different speedzones? For higher education, time moves at a different speed. There is the academic year. Committees meet, discuss, and plan. Votes occur. Action is slow to take place. It’s somewhere between normal time and Ent time. And that’s fine. Academic time and normal time can work out the differences. However, Internet time is exponentially greater than normal time.
Enter the problem of MOOC’s. MOOC’s are a disruption, because they exist in Internet time and affect academia. If you’ve been reading or writing about MOOC’s, it’s hard to keep up, because every week it seems like a new university joins the fray or another set of classes is offered. If you’re a student and you want to take a class, how do you keep track of what’s available?
One way is through OEDb’s listing of free online open courses. It works like an aggregated course catalog of MOOC’s. Students can browse by subject, they can search, or they can browse the full listings.
Similarly, students can search for courses at Course Talk. An additional feature of Course Talk is the ability for people to rate courses and leave reviews.
If you’ve participated in a MOOC, how did you discover the course and what suggestions do you have for other people looking for the right MOOC?
Tim is a Fellow in Digital Humanities and Pedagogy at Hendrix College and publisher of Scintilla. You can follow him on Twitter at @singlesoliloquy. If you'd like to schedule a meeting click here.
And, as soon as I wrote this I saw a tweet about Class Central http://www.class-central.com/.
I feel like this is typical of the information asymmetry in the modern marketplace. Step one is the marketplace of courses. Step two is the review sites of courses. Step three is the reviews of review sites of courses (or perhaps the reviews of reviewers). And all the while the course providers try to game the reviews.
Right, it will be the Amazon scandal all over again.