MOOCS: 12 Reasons for universities not to panic

Don't believe the hype? There has been an extraordinary level of hype in higher education (and beyond) about Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. Vice-Chancellors and their senior management teams up and down the country have been fretting about the developments and whether they need to get on board with one of the big players …

Not Guilty, Your Honour: students and cheating

Honour codes and cheating Two fascinating stories recently about students cheating and responses to it. All universities face the issue of how to educate students on the importance of honesty and integrity in academic study and avoiding plagiarism and other forms of cheating. Many US institutions have what is called an Honour Code to which …

The Beginning of the End for Traditional HE?

Will MOOCs kill universities? No. Forbes carries an expansive piece on the implications of MOOCs and asks "Is Coursera the Beginning of the End for Traditional Higher Education?". Could high-quality MOOCs eventually do to traditional colleges and universities what Craigslist has done to classified advertising in newspapers and what Wikipedia has done to encyclopedias? In other …

The Imperfect University: Massive Open Online Confusion?

The Future of HE? Or Massive Open Online Confusion? For the latest Imperfect University piece a few thoughts on a topic which is attracting considerable comment at the moment: the growth of the Massive Open Online Course or MOOC. There has been a huge amount of hype around the new models of online provision or …