MOOCs on BoB

…or, if learning technology acronyms are not your cup of tea, Massive Open Online Courses on Box of Broadcasts.

@bufvc_bob has tweeted a link to the last edition of the Radio 4 Zeitgeisters series (requires login) on BoB, in which Will Gompertz meets cultural entrepreneurs shaping our lives. Here Will talks to Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng from Coursera.org, “who are seeking to take university education into the Internet age.”

Having worked in HE e-learning since 2000, part of me resents the implication that HE has not embraced the Internet for teaching and learning – but of course there is some truth in this, as echoed by Steve Rowett from UCL in his keynote presentation at our lecture capture conference in which (with some poetic licence) he showed how a 13thC lecture at the University of Bologna was essentially the same model that you would find in many lecture theatres at UCL, Lougborough, or indeed anywhere else today.

The numbers of students enrolled in courses on Coursera (and the other main platforms) are startling, and it is this apparent explosion of MOOCs that has driven the Open University and other institutions in the UK to form the Futurelearn consortium (to which Loughborough now belongs).