Dive Summary:
- The University of Maine at Presque Isle is experimenting with small-scale open courses that provost Michael Sonntag calls "LOOCs": little open online courses.
- The courses are an institutional initiative allowing the university to try open teaching on a scale that fits their resources while hopefully recruiting more students.
- Because of their scale, Presque Isle's LOOCs will be able to leave instructional rigor and potential credit on the table.
From the article:
The buzz surrounding massive open online courses, or MOOCs, has grown nearly as massive as the courses themselves. MOOCs are the new "thneeds," the oddly-shaped items peddled by the Once-ler in The Lorax: Everybody seems to want one, even if nobody yet knows exactly what they are or what they mean. But amid all this MOOC mania, the University of Maine at Presque Isle is attempting a different kind of free online offering - one that would swap the scale of a MOOC for the high-touch experience of a conventional online course. ...