[LINK] Open Universities Australia Free On-line Courses

[Tom Worthington]

There has been much media hype about US Massive Open Online Courses 
(MOOCs). The promise is an education from the world's leading 
universities for free to anyone. The reality is that few people ever 
complete these courses and most do not offer formal university 
qualifications. In effect these "courses" are the on-line equivalent of 
being allowed to sit in on lectures, which are the least useful part of 
a course.

One interesting local development is Open Universities Australia (OUA), 
offering a few free on-line courses under the brand "Open2Study": 
https://www.open2study.com/subjects

Open2Study appears to be implemented with Drupal. These are nice and 
modest little courses, run over four weeks, with about nine videos and 
quizzes per week. The suggested study time is 2 to 4 hours per week, 
which is much less than a typical university course (about 12 hours a 
week). Also OUA are being very clear about why they are offering these 
for free: to promote the full for-fee courses which provide a 
qualification to get a job.

One of the courses which got my attention is "Writing for the Web" by 
Frankie Madden: https://www.open2study.com/subjects/writing-for-the-web

What I could not find out from the web site (which is common to such 
consortia), is how a course designer for one members of OUA offers a 
course. I wanted to offer a MOOC version of the ICT Sustainability 
course I designed for the Australian Computer Society (which is part of 
OUA). My aim is to use the same video and quizzes from the MOOC for the 
full "SCOC" (Small Closed On-line Course): 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2013/03/open-universities-australia-moocs.html

Also I have been talking to Matthew Benetti at Pozible.com to see if 
MOOCs could be Crowdfunded. While large institutions can afford to fund 
a few MOOCs funded by their marketing budget, that option is not open to 
small institutions and individual educators: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2013/03/crowd-funding-for-creative-work.html

Developing a MOOC with a completion rate equivalent to that of 
conventional university courses, and offering formal qualifications, is 
not beyond the state of the art in education. This could be done by 
applying existing on-line pedagogy, but would require some investment.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/