 some feedback about the online ed universe from the experts, if you will. As Shauna said before, this is our sailor office, which with a pretty good portion of our staff, some of our staff is remote as well, and they'll be checking in through our YouTube channel. And everyone, this is Professor Stephen Krause, who is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University, and you may have to help me with this. Ipsilanti? Ipsilanti, very good. I'm from Minnesota, so I'm used to a lot of vowels making a lot of different sounds that they don't normally make. Ipsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses which explore the connections between writing and technology. Professor Krause's writing has appeared in the journals College Composition and Communication, Kyros, Computers in Composition, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Professor Krause has been teaching online for over six years and has been a student participant in about half a dozen MOOCs. He keeps a blog, very funny blog by the way, at StephenKrause.com and is co-editing a collection of essays about MOOCs scheduled for release in the fall. And I'd like to turn everything over to you. Thank you and welcome. Oh, thanks for having me. And it's kind of a weird format because it's like, I know you're there and I'm here, and we're kind of in the same space, but we're not and all that kind of stuff, so we'll muddle through it together. The other thing is that for things like this, I can't just talk because if I just talk, I'll just kind of like ramble on forever. So what I have here is kind of a, so I'm going to go away and put up slides, but I'm still here, so you can imagine my face still. And I'm going to put up some slides and then I'm going to read through what we're talking about here. And I think that I can get that, can I get this a little bit bigger? Let me see here. Maybe I can't. I think that's it. That's a little bit bigger. Okay, so let me go ahead and get started. What I'm going to do is talk a little bit about what I've been thinking about with MOOCs lately, and I'm calling this two truths and four questions because that's building off of some stuff that I've written about lately, but you know, you can, it's a working title, as they say. A little bit more about me. As Jackie said, I teach at EMU and we're an opportunity granting state university about 10 miles away from the University of Michigan. Most of our students are from Southeast Michigan, and my scholarly interest in rhetoric and writing is in rhetoric and writing generally, and computers and writing more specifically, and for those of you who don't know what that means, you probably all remember freshman composition, I do a lot of those sorts of courses, and I also teach graduate courses and the teaching of writing and about rhetoric and technology, things like that. I've taught courses online, as Jackie mentioned, but those are only students of about 20 or so students in a course or less, either for advanced courses. I've been blogging for about 10 years or so at StephenDCrowsey.com, and it used to be about all kinds of different stuff, but it sure seems like for the last year and a half or so it's been mostly about MOOCs. Both my musings as a scholar, but also as my experience as a student, as a professor who's tried to use a MOOC in an online class, I taught last winter. All this blogging and MOOC has led to my participation in webinars like this and conference talks. I did an invited talk for the American Federation of Teachers last winter. I had some articles go out. I've got a book of essays I'm working on. I've become the sort of MOOC scholar and expert without really planning on going down this path, but here we are. Before I get to the truths and the questions, I want to share two important quotes that I hope will frame this discussion a little bit. The first comes from William Rainey Harper who helped to organize what was then the first president of the University of Chicago. He was also an early innovator in distance education. The major teaching technology of Harper's Day was the Postal Service and Harper predicted in the late 19th century that it would turn higher education on its head. Quoting from a 2001 Mother Jones article called Digital Diploma Mills, which is actually an article that complains about the first wave of online teaching a dozen or so years ago. Harper said that the day is coming when the work done by correspondents will be greater in amount than that done in the classrooms of our academies and colleges. The second quote comes from what is clearly the best Star Wars movie and that's The Empire Strikes Back. As Yoda reminds the young Luke Skywalker, who is about to believe his Jedi train to rescue his friends in Cloud City, difficult to see. Always in motion is the future. So whenever you hear someone who's offering too confident of a prediction of where Mooks are going or going to be in the next three months, let alone in the next three years, you should remember both Harper's and Yoda's wisdom. So into the meat of matters here I would assume that if you're here about this, you've heard of Mooks before but this is a basic starting point. Mook stands for Massive Online Open Course. Massive means courses with thousands of students, though the dropout rate is so high that the number of students you see reported for courses is almost a meaningless. And the title of student is probably misleading too. Online means just that, usually through a learning management system, though often dispersed across platforms. Open means that anyone anywhere with a reliable internet connection can participate in the course for free, at least as the current model. And perhaps the most slippery term is course. That's probably a metaphor more than anything else because Mooks aren't... Now, Luzia! Yeah. Wasn't that bad? Oh my goodness. We had a little bit of a Wi-Fi cut out, right? Oh, figures, okay. Well, I'll press on from where it was. Is that okay? Yeah, that's fine. Okay. Let's see here. Go back to this part. Okay, so you're seeing that again, right? So you're seeing words again, right? Yes. Okay, good. The first Mooks have their roots in the... I'm just going to keep reading, you know, press on word. Just wave if, you know, things get, you know, wonky. The first Mooks have their roots in open access education and edu-punk movements, and the term was coined in 2008 by a group of Canadians. Then in 2011, Peter Norvig taught a MOOC, I believe this was at Stanford, had well over 100,000 students in it. That success paid the way for the likes of Coursera and Udacity. Venture Capitalists invested millions. The mainstream media decided MOOCs were the solution to the problem of higher education. Here we are. Now, with that brief introduction, as they say, out of the way, I want to move on to the truths, as it were, at least the way as I'm getting a truth with a scare quotes around the word there. Truth number one, MOOCs in online education are not the same thing. Now, of course, people at the Sailor Foundation would already know this, since you've been developing online courses for a long time. But I pointed this out because almost every mainstream media article I read about MOOCs, and frankly, a lot in places that should know better, like the Chronicle of Higher Education, collapsed MOOC in online education to one thing. Furthermore, despite Coursera's co-founders, Daphne Koller's believed that she and other MOOC enthusiasts at elite institutions invented online education with MOOCs. Online courses have been around for decades. I've been teaching it for quite a while, and I know that online courses were happening before I started teaching it. In fact, the best statistics I've seen says that a third of all college students across different platforms are taking courses online right now. So this is not a strange thing at all. And really, it isn't all that new, either. The kind of vision that William Rainier Harper had of correspondence schools replacing brick and mortar institutions didn't come to pass, and most correspondence courses in the 20th century probably could have been filed in the fly-by-night category of things. But these courses didn't replace college courses at all. Although they did give students a different set of options, and many universities still offer correspondence courses. Actually, as a student in the 80s, I took a correspondence course in 1988. I was getting ready to graduate from the University of Iowa and started an MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth, and halfway through my last semester in college, I found out that I was three credits short of graduation. So I signed up for a correspondence course, interesting enough in fiction writing. I submitted a portfolio of stories I had submitted to get into VCU's graduate program, and after some nice exchanges with my teacher, I got some kind of dubious college credits. Anyways, my point is that when Obama said one paragraph from an hour-long speech back in July about how he wanted to reinvent higher education by both testing new approaches to shorten the path to a degree or blending teaching with online learning to help students master material and earn credits in less time, that doesn't automatically mean moots. Despite what the mainstream media tends to report. Of course, I'm not really sure what Obama really knows what it means either, but that's potentially a different conversation. Okay, truth number two. There are mooks, and then there are mooks. And it seems to me that how one defines mooks says a lot about their promise and peril. So what I mean by this is this is how George Siemens, who's one of the Canadians credited with coming up with mooks in the first place, defines the difference between what he calls C mooks and X mooks. This is kind of a long quote. Largely lost in the conversation about mooks is the different ideology that drives what are currently two broad mook offerings. The connectivist mook, what he calls C mooks, that I have been involved with since 2008, and the well-financed mooks by Coursera and edX, what he calls X mooks. Our mook model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social network learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way, C mooks focus on knowledge creation and generation, whereas X mooks focus on knowledge duplication. I've spoken with learners from different parts. They're back! You're back! You're back! Let me finish this quote. I've spoken with learners from different parts of the world who find X mooks extremely beneficial as they don't have access to learning materials of that quality at their institutions. X mooks scale, and they have prestigious universities supporting them, and they are well-financed. It is quite possible that they will address the drill-and-grill instructional methods as receiving some criticism. Now, I'm not crazy about the terms C mook versus X mook, and I don't agree with Siemens about how the teaching scales, but I think you get the idea. The distinction between a connectivist mook are about open-source tools, community, questioning the current model of higher education, not about credit, and X mooks are about containment and delivery of presentation and credit, or at least hopefully for money. The Coursera at all hasn't really quite figured out whether they're going to be making money yet, but that's another issue. Siemens described running his mook as a quote, off the side of the desk operation in conjunction with a more traditional course, while Coursera and edX are major corporate enterprises or trying to be major corporate enterprises that are trying to run courses in and of themselves, or at least they were trying to do this initially until they kind of collapsed into being sort of a learning management system. I'll talk about that in a bit. C mooks are more about open education movement and X mooks are more about re-inscribing the values of higher education as they exist, which is why, in my view, there's such an emphasis in the commercial mook community on elite universities as content providers. After all, that's what everyone has heard of. They've heard of the Harvard's and the University of Michigan's of the world. They haven't heard of the Eastern Michigan's of the world as a word. They're very, very careful of collapsed definitions of mooks. For example, Jonathan Reese writes this near the beginning of his slate piece, the mook racket widespread online only higher ed will be disastrous for students and most professors. He writes mooks stands for massive open online course. The term was coined by a group of Canadian academics in 2008 to represent a recently invented type of online class that depends upon small group interactions for most instruction. More recently, three instructors at Stanford University Computer Science Department appropriated that term to start two separate private education companies, Udacity and Coursera. Despite being free of charge, the mooks that these firms offer bear more than passing resemblance to ordinary college classes, except that they're delivered over the internet to tens of thousands of people involved. So you see what I mean here? That group of Canadians that he's talking about were the same ones trying to make the distinction between C. mooks and Coursera and Udacity, Udacity's ex-mooks in the first place. He basically bundles them all up in a one group and calls them all bad, I assume because what he really gets is the ex-mooks of the world. Second, it seems to me that most of the discussion about the promise and parallel of mooks, especially in the academic precedent among university faculty, depends entirely on these two different definitions, different and calmly confused definitions of mooks. As Jackie said at the beginning, I'm working with a colleague right now on editing a collection about mooks. It's a collection of short essays by faculty and graduate students and a couple of people in publishing who have been involved in mooks in a variety of different ways, as some of, we have some contributors who have developed courses through Coursera, a lot of people who have been students like myself, faculty as students, people just close reading critics. And our goal with the collection is to get the voices of teachers and students into the larger discussion about mooks because it seems to me that most of the discussion has been dominated by administrators, education entrepreneurs and pundits outside of classrooms. Anyway, one of the challenges we're facing as editors is this definition of mook because generally speaking, the writers who think that mooks are a bad idea are assuming a corporate for-profit model and the ones who think that mooks are a good idea are assuming a more open-ended, not-for-profit community-building exercise like our colleagues in Canada. Okay. So with all that truthiness out of the way, let me move on to the last part here which is the four questions. These are questions that are sort of, I pose I guess just to sort of start some conversation, but the things I've been thinking about lately in terms of after being in and soaking in these mooks for a while. The first one is why mass... The massiness is what's attracted all the attention in the press. 50,000 students in this class, 100,000 students in that class, blah, blah, blah. Never mind that 90% of these students drop out of the class or weren't actually in the class in the first place which I'll get to with question two. Right now, all of the mooks I've seen, I've mostly seen, of course, Sarah Mooks, maybe I'm wrong about this, put all 10 or 20 or 50,000 students into one space. That might be kind of interesting and useful if the Mooks star professor was given a live lecture or some other sort of thing to, you know, like a senior favorite rock band perform, but Mook lectures are pre-recorded well before the class. There's often no evidence that the professor is ever present at all, so what's the point of making it one big group? You're still there, right? There you go. Another one popped up there. To me, you're still seeing this, right? To me, Mook providers could learn a lot from the way we teach first year writing and large programs, and I don't know how many of you are familiar with this, but basically in places like EMU where we have 2,000 students or so all teaching, taking freshman composition in a semester, we don't put all those students in one big lecture hall or in an online space or something like that. Rather, we divide them up into groups of 25 or so students, and we give the students the same or at least similar experiences with common textbooks and assignments. There's a lot of reasons for doing this, but probably the most important reason is that teaching writing is a labor-intensive and qualitative process, certainly one that's different from courses where we're comfortable teaching it in a lecture hall format. This is easily divided students into smaller groups that are all identical versions of the same class. After all, one thing we do know is that content scales very well. If these 10,000 Mook students are divided up into smaller groups, I think the discussion interaction between students, which is not pretty useless, frankly, for anybody who's ever logged into a Mook discussion forum, that can actually be useful. The Mook providers don't think that interaction between students is that useful, then just get rid of it and just have lectures and tests will be done. Question number two, why open? There are lots of reasons why the drop rate for Mooks is high. One important reason is that a lot of people who sign up for Mooks simply for curious about what the fuss is all about, they check out and then they never return. It sort of reminds me of what happens with people who sign up for accounts on like Twitter or other social networking sites. They sign up for, they're there for 10 minutes, and then they never, ever return to the account. And yet those people tend to be counted as users. So in that sense, it's not so much that these people dropped out, but they were never actually interested in meeting the course in the first place. But for those who start with good intentions and who still drop out, I think that one of the reasons for this is because there's a pretty low bar for staying motivated. And one way to improve on this would be to raise the cost of participation, which in turn raises the cost of giving up. Coursera has rolled out a program called Signature Track, which is an authentication system for the purposes of assigning credit. That is, Coursera tracks who a student is and then realizing that they're not cheating, they use that as a mechanism for granting that student credit. Folks at Coursera had a recent article in Eddie Cause where they discussed and frankly trying to excuse the drop-out rate of some of these courses. Here's what Daphne Kohler and colleagues say about Signature Track in this article. Retention of this article. Sign up for Signature Track is a clear statement by students that they intend to complete the course and earn it credential. In the first Signature Track class, which is called Nutrition for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, taught by Professor Katie Farrow at the University of California, San Francisco, the completion rate of Signature Track students was 74% compared to 9% for non-symmetric track students. Now, of course, not being free means living in access and that obviously has drawbacks, but I think what MOOCs are experiencing with their drop-out rate is what Clay Shurky discusses and here comes everybody about the low cost of failure. That is, students don't stick with the MOOCs because, well, why should they? It's free. It's not like they're getting anything tangible out of it. The other problem is the failure isn't free for the MOOC providers, both in terms of actual costs of providing the MOOCs and also in terms of the validity of the concept. Question number three. Why is the focus of MOOCs always about gen ed? At least as far as I can tell that's the case. That is, all the MOOC courses I have seen are trying to be like or even replace various kinds of introductory courses. You see as part of general occasion almost everywhere or they're really kind of edutainment courses. They don't really seem analogous to traditional college courses per se. I mean, there are courses, I took a course like this from the University of Edinburgh in online digital cultures and stuff like that. It's not really quite a course. My experience though with MOOCs so far has been that almost every one of my fellow students I've been kind of in discussion forms are college educated professionals who are more or less just interested in the topic of the format of the MOOC rather than taking the MOOC because they want it to be like college. Of course, Sarah has more or less acknowledged this audience problem with their move to partner with some flagship but not necessarily elite public universities to more or less get into the learning management system business as it takes on companies like Blackboard. I understand the intentions for that but in terms of trying to get more students through the pipeline and get them educated and things like that it seems to me that if your audience is more interested in advanced courses then maybe there's something to be said for MOOCs that are more like graduate seminars than Kenneth Berger-Jacques-Duridot. It seems to me that's a real untapped market for those would-be graduate students out there, professionals who want to continue to learn and participate in at least a quasi-intellectual discussion but who want nothing to do with formal graduate school training. We all know that advanced undergraduates and graduate students are a lot more self-motivated and self-disciplined first year college students. I think it's fair to say that success in online classes heavily correlates to student self-motivation and self-discipline. At EMU and the program I teach we don't teach first year writing online because we want those students to show up and have a face-to-face college experience. But we're pretty comfortable teaching advanced courses online and I think with some reasonable success. So it seems to me that there's been academic mailing lists that have talked about various intellectuals and intellectual theories for years that have a field of graduate seminars. So why not a move about Derrida or Burke? And this is my last question which is why courses? I think I understand why it's courses now. That's the unit of measure we have in schooling along with semesters, grades, etc. It reminds me a bit of the way we've historically seen media technologies change. The first print books look like handwritten manuscripts with big margins and fonts and all that because that's what came before print. We still call things on the web a page because that's what came before these books and other documents that had pages. It's hard to think outside the box if you don't know what is outside the box. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't try. So what would a MOOC be if it weren't a course? Well, I don't really know what MOOCs are. One is MOOCs are essentially textbooks because basically both are forms of delivering content from experts. MOOCs, of course, have the potential for interactivity that more interactivity than standard print textbooks. Though given that we were perhaps seeing the end of print textbooks, maybe MOOCs and textbooks are going to become indistinguishable. Second, MOOCs become a sort of could become a sort of community resource around a particular topic that's simply ongoing. When it comes to first-year writing, I'm thinking of imagining something that's sort of like a cross between the Purdue Online Writing Lab, which is a very well-trafficked site about all kinds of things. All sorts of tutorials having to do with writing. The fan fiction site of the kind of place where people submit stories of various things that are read and reviewed by other fans. And maybe kind of a writing program website where what people would do who administer the writing program would share information about that program for everybody. And then they can interact like that. It might still be possible for people interested in the topic of that sort of ongoing to get some kind of life-earned credit or AP-like credit or test credit with some sort of rolling ongoing tests and quizzes or such. But the main point would be an ongoing learning community which in my mind returns and moves back to the original intention of learning for learning's sakes and not so much as replacement for the courses we teach in college. So I think that that's me as far as my spiel goes. So let me see if I can turn this off so you can see me again. Okay, so that's me. Ta-da! Thank you. Thank you so much Professor Cowell. So I had a couple of questions. You said that perhaps MOOCs probably shouldn't be free. Hopefully I'm not misinterpreting that. Or at least the offerings that are kind of out of industry offering shouldn't be free. I've noticed on your blog that you've done a little writing about the so-called failed offering for credit by Colorado State University. They decided to run a MOOC available for credit for a discount and there weren't any takers. Where do you think that incident falls as far as MOOCs could be offered for a price yet? The market doesn't seem to be ready. How would you interpret that in your preferred model for MOOCs? You know, that's an interesting situation because to me that's also a really good example of the way that MOOCs right now seem to have a profound audience problem. Because the audience that I think that the ideal audience for Coursera would be students of traditional freshman age maybe in the US, maybe in Europe, maybe in other places who are actually seeking some sort of college credit as part of a degree program, right? I mean, that's where they see their mission both to be generous and I don't think these are bad people or anything like that. I mean, in terms of like what they're trying to do in terms of educating the world but also in terms of where the money would be, where people would actually be paying for it. The problem is that Coursera is essentially acknowledges, the problem is the people who have signed up these courses right now have been predominantly like all of us. Educated interested in various kinds of topics interested in edutainment for the sake of edutainment. In other words, you take a course in a computer program because you think computer program might be kind of interesting. You're not taking the course because you want to get college credit. You don't need college credit. Does that make sense? So what I'm getting at is is that that's a big problem that these major providers have if they, number one, are trying to reach people to get them access to education and, number two, if they're trying to make money from it. So one way to potentially shift that, and this is what I'm getting at in terms of like, maybe there needs to be some kind of cost participation to offset the cost of running these MOOCs in the first place. Maybe what some of these MOOC providers need to do is figure out a way to get all participants to pay something for it. One of my colleagues we were talking about this a while ago, one of my colleagues said to me after I finished when a friend of mine in Michigan stayed at after I finished one of these MOOCs he said, what would you have paid for that? You know, just as a sort of entertainment, you know, as an experience what would you have paid for that? And I thought about it for a second and my response to the particular cost I was thinking of was probably nothing. But on the other hand I can imagine where there would be situations where people would pay not very much where people might be willing to put up with some advertising or something you know what I'm, does that make sense? In other words what I'm getting at is that getting people to invest something of themselves into one of these courses is one way that these MOOCs can increase their completion rates because if students don't have any investment in finishing it then you know, they're not going to get anything out of it and if they're not going to get anything tangible out of it like credit and if they're not going to you know these things can't keep funding themselves forever without some sort of like investment from the students in there too. Does that make sense? It's kind of a long way of going about answering. I'm not sure if that's a clear answer in the world. I think it does. It seems like I wasn't sure and wasn't able to find in time did you happen to know what kind of course the Colorado State course is because it seems like that's an interesting interesting case in that usually there's an economic theory of substitution where usually if there's a lower cost good that seems to be able to provide the same amount of benefit consumers will more likely take the lower cost good but there's some lack of perception of the benefit where the students opted to take the in-person experience rather than take the cheaper or less expensive rather online offering. I think that's exactly right. I think that I think that one of the reasons why students aren't paying for these things even though they can be really inexpensive is it's like well I don't know if this is going to transfer to the school that I want to go to or I don't know if I'm going to get out of this experience the same thing we get out of a face-to-face or online class directly from Colorado state versus through Udacity or something like that and the other thing that I think is really really important that that the MOOC providers I don't think have quite wrapped their heads around yet is and it's kind of it's hard for me to wrap my head around it because you know as a professor I think in terms of the courses I teach right but you know students don't come to college to go to take courses they come to college to complete a degree so you know if you're you can offer all the free courses kind of like out there on the internet or whatever that you want but unless there's an easy and tangible way for students to put that together into a degree program it's not really worth that much to them so I think what happened was I think that a lot of these students at Colorado state basically I think that a lot of these people basically said well I'm never going to transfer this credit to Colorado state so why on earth would I pay for this and again the audience the audience said that these MOOC providers seem to be reaching so far are not 18 year olds they're 28 or 30 year olds who are interested in you know learning something that's the my second question kind of follows on to the app what for online providers of education especially for the providers what would they need to set up to really have a justified value add for like a having maybe a free model of MOOC and then having I guess maybe more of a MOOC because it wouldn't necessarily be open because it wouldn't be free but a premium online course what where do you feel like the value is justified for that and audiences that tend to gravitate toward it now well I you know I don't I don't have a really good answer for that but I'll tell you what I this is my best guess answer I think that when Coursera and Udacity and more idea if we really want to include the more idealized or idealistic rather edu-punk open ed kind of movement of people I'm trying to bypass the university system entirely okay in other words we don't to quote a famous movie we don't need your stinking credentials right we can just we should be able to just put together a whole series of things online through open education things and through MOOCs that are free and you know what I'm saying others bypass the entire college degree apparatus and just have this stuff available for people to you know get online right that don't make sense right yes the problem with that isn't so much what's happening in universities but what's happening outside of universities in the the employment sector because if you know I the reason why a lot of my students are well actually the reason why all my students are here is one of the reasons is because they know when they finish they can take their EMU credential and go to an employer and say look I have a bachelor's degree or a master's degree from an accredited university that you've kind of heard of before but if someone says I have a bunch of badges from various online sorts of things right now the private sector or the employment sector says that doesn't count now we could debate whether or not that's a good idea or not I think that there's a pretty good argument that for a lot of professions it's a terrible I mean the current system is terrible there's no reason I've got all these students who come back to school in their mid 30s or early 40s because they've been in some kind of white collar position working for Ford for 25 years with a high school diploma or maybe high school diploma a couple years of college or something like that but they're coming back to school reluctantly because they've been told the only way you can move on to the next level of management is to have a degree you know I'm not sure that you know what I mean I'm not sure that that piece of paper means that much to that sort of individual I'm not sure that that kind of person wouldn't be better served by a system of badges and online sorts of opportunities and things like that I'm just telling you what the rules are and the rules are right now you gotta have a college degree so the first problem that MOOCs providers had and this is what they if you listen to the early talks by people like Daphne Kohler and stuff like that that's I think what they were trying to do they were trying to bypass entirely the credit granting machine that is higher education okay that didn't work at least it isn't going to work right now until there are major changes within our culture but that's not going to change anytime soon the next place for MOOCs it seems to me is some combination between this connectivist MOOC ideal and maybe what the course areas of the world are trying to do what I mean by that is that I think that if you dispense with the idea of like we need to make a lot of money out of this we need to grant college we need to compete with universities and things like that but rather you see MOOCs as something that exists in conjunction with the kinds of things that are happening in classrooms like in traditional universities I think it could be a tremendous supplement and I think that there's actually I also think there's some interesting things that are potentially really interesting for AP kind of placement sort of opportunities or it's a good public relations opportunity for a lot of universities to sort of expose to people who might be interested in college or curious what's going on in college things like that and then the other thing that I don't know what their chances are but the idea of course here are trying to compete with learning management systems like Blackboard because that's essentially what they've kind of decided to do they've kind of decided to partner with places like the the state of New York system and I know this is going on in Kentucky and some other places where they want to roll out whole courses that through their system that are taught by folks at these institutions that can come from credit at those institutions so it's kind of like a hybrid between Blackboard which is essentially just a shell and what's going on with MOOCs right now so in other words this latest move that Coursera has been trying to make and you see this with fugacity with some of the stuff going on like San Jose State and stuff like that has been kind of like if we can't beat them we'll join them and they're trying to create tools that might be useful in traditional higher ed so I guess I'm saying is that the initial goal of like let's just create a whole new system I don't see it happen in my lifetime maybe I'm a pessimist are there any other questions I don't know I'm curious that raises a question that may be a very brief answer I don't know do you see the potential for universities to increasingly sort of co-opt even and adapt this toward their own intramural collaboration so I mean we have Semester Online which is seeing successes and other non-successes depending but you know even for simple things like for really small degree programs, departments the ability to really quickly offer an important course that you simply can't teach that semester for whatever constraints absolutely and I don't know what it's called now you guys might know better than me but there's there's a different acronym but they've described it as a feminist move and it's a it's a mook and women's studies it's about women's studies introduction of feminism and stuff like that but it's being taught by faculty and instructors at like a dozen different institutions and so they're all teaching like little parts of it right and then everybody at those institutions can get credit for the class so it becomes a sort of like process institutional collaborative kind of kind of space that's cool because the thing is that if nothing else you know I don't know if that necessarily is going to Thomas Freeman has these columns that sort of suggests that you know I'm out of a job in six months and I think that that's kind of ridiculous but if mooks do nothing else but then expand, you know break down some of the barriers between institutions and that's fantastic because we're not able to do enough of that right now and I think that has a lot of potential cool that was actually going to my question I don't have any more thoughts on the dock because when they're calling it the anti-mook feminist the dock that distributed open collaborative course you just think it's more promising or do you think it's something that's scalable because I mean we're having these small cohorts kind of cooperate do you think it's something that will adapt and even come out side of the feminist topic and outside of something that's already predisposition do you welcome that type of collaboration Oh absolutely I think that if you listen to people like Steven Downs or George Simmons the guy these Canadians that's essentially what they saw happening with this their initial mook the sea mook kind of thing this whole connectivity sort of space and they're doing all kinds of crazy stuff where they have a platform where students interact kind of like a centralized space but then it's dispersed over this network so that they link to all the students who have blogs about it they're linking the Facebook groups about it there's a Twitter feed about it all this is just dispersed over all these different spaces and so and it's about again the goal is about generating knowledge and about generating community and less about sitting there and getting credit you know what I mean so I think that feminism obviously lends itself just in terms of philosophy and ideology lends itself well to the kind of collaborative disperse multi-nodal kind of network kind of thing so it's a good topic you know be trying to with the is it DAC? Is that how they say it? A distributed open collaborative as opposed to Duke which is a bad guy in Star Wars right? that's a good thing but anyways what I'm getting at is that feminism obviously lends itself as a subject matter to that but I think there's a lot of things that work really well seems like the entrepreneurial more like the business end I mean you see all these kind of for profit pay besides you know you don't pay too much but you get access to a lot of the videos you get access to go to the go experts or people in the field that seems like another space where this could be people would really take on at least the multi-channel connectivity of it as well Oh I agree and I think that you know you've all heard of what is it lynda.com? General Assembly no I'm thinking of the I can't think of it I think it's L-Y I'm trying to see if I want to Yeah it's lynda.com there's several well those have been pretty those that's a pretty profitable enterprise where they're putting up online these tutorials and lessons for learning how to do like Photoshop or whatever and part of that enterprise involves also distribution instructors so like they've you can if you know your stuff about whatever you can you can develop a course and have it in part of that site and you get a cut of that of whatever they get for people paying for that and this is not I'm not really I do a lot of web writing stuff but that's a little bit above my skill level and interest in terms of that kind of level of design but as I understand it those sorts of design those sorts of how to design how to you know video audio all those kind of platforms that are very successful very collaborative very entrepreneurial which lines what you're talking about so yeah absolutely to me I mean I don't have any money to start a business but all right well do you have any questions for us since we're here I don't know your level of familiarity familiarity with our teaching model but we offer asynchronous content kind of learning at your own pace completely open model in mostly university but professional development in K-12 as well so we're not we're not a offering necessarily because everything is asynchronous and you know there's not really a coordinated guideline through most of our courses to partner with some higher education institutions a lot that serve adult non-traditional students for some credit options but we're kind of we're kind of a piece of a lot of the offerings that are on there I guess it's the Sean you're smiling is that an accurate yes but I mean we we skate this interesting interesting line we live on the edges of some things in the center of others you know with the you know disintegration of the term MOOC and maybe abuse of the term MOOC to just main online course you know we certainly fall under that definition all the time and it's funny how MOOC kind of changed the discourse a little bit so if people can't use the term MOOC they're not really sure how to refer to open courseware and online courses and other e-learning options and I think the phrase e-learning has really taken off the US the way it has elsewhere so yeah it's we got a lot of complex stuff going on and we have you know some of the issues you talked about with how do you the value of free or how do individuals value something that doesn't cost them actual money and even and even you know the massiness due to the asynchronous nature of the courses you know some are much larger than others and so to be around them can be tough but I don't know how much you do know about us do you have any questions for us well you know I don't know very much but it's kind of but you know from what I was poking around with the website and such I'm kind of wondering if have you guys been talking to people at Udacity or Coursera or edX or whatever because it seems to me like you know there might be some synergy there I mean you know one of the things that's frustrating to me particularly about Coursera is they don't really know very much about teaching they they've hired people who can program sort of I don't know very much about the platform in terms of how it works but I'm told that the you know behind the behind the interface kind of coding is pretty gobbly-gooky I mean but you know they don't it doesn't seem like they've talked to a lot of people in education generally and certainly not people in who've been doing online education for a while so I don't know have you chatted with these people at all or not yeah to varying degrees you know we've talked to the organizations themselves and individuals within them and you know folks like Khan Academy et cetera et cetera we're kind of you know in and out of conversations yeah and I think you know we obviously pay a lot of close attention to the space so you know the new rounds of investment and new developments new partnerships are always you know kind of trigger a new discussion here as well well it says you know that Chinese curse of interesting times right yep yeah I mean 2012 was the year of the mook and I think 2013 is yet to be declared so yeah I think I think that I mean I'm not like I said with Yoda and I'm not going to like make too many predictions about where this is going I have a very very very difficult time believing that um well let me put it to you this way you know Coursera as you guys know is like what $60 million in venture capital something like that in the last year or two right I know that someone's put a lot of money you know venture capital don't put money into things because they think it's a nice idea um but I just they must tell something that I don't know in terms of how they're going to make money from this because I have a just I just have a really hard I think that the concept of mooks are going to be around for a while I think the concept of distance education is going to be around for a while I think the kind of stuff that you guys are doing as a not-for-profit enterprise that makes total sense to me I think partnering with universities and then trying to break out of the mold of way things are happening that that totally makes sense the idea though that maybe like Facebook or some other huge enterprise that is all of a sudden is going to blow up and just be this giant yeah doesn't make sense to me I know I believe it's Udacity that was trying to monetize itself as kind of a professional development recruitment type mechanism where they would refer their highest performing students to partner organizations and kind of bridge that gap to get them jobs kind of like University of Phoenix promises to do like that yeah I was going to say that makes sense and it seemed to me I read some place where some of these you know there's a lot of corporations that do various kinds of training that you know how that is you go to some sort of like corporate training class and you sit there for an hour and they tell you about how to do something and then you leave and that's that kind of where there's people you know a lot of that kind of stuff could be handled through these kind of MOOC like units that just they exist and actually probably asynchronously they exist people go to these units and complete various sorts of tests and things like that and then you go out with their lives so yeah I think that that's a potential space for um that's a potential space that the Coursera people and Udacity people I don't think have thought about yet because or thought to part about yet because after all the people who created them were university professors they don't do corporate training you know so I could see that well are there any other questions any other questions okay if not thank you so much well thanks for having me I really appreciate it and um we'll send you the link to are we going to do a final video kind of linking all the portions together I don't know but we will certainly have the raw video yeah we'll figure some kind of way that cool we'll send your words back to you it's all I need you can always send to mom or friend but thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today and um please stay in touch we'll have a conference coming up next year around May May 1st and 2nd so if you are in the DC area and you like visiting us for some much warmer weather please who knows it might happen yet thanks for having me thanks for joining us take care