Dive Summary:
- Writing for the Huffington Post, Northwestern University Prof. Owen Youngman says he did some digging while preparing to teach his first MOOC and came up with 10 misconceptions both inside and outside of academia.
- Among the misconceptions: Youngman says creating a MOOC is neither completely different from nor pretty much the same as creating a course for the classroom.
- Youngman says it's also a mistake to believe that the students and professor have nothing at stake.
From the article:
... What's not different: Selecting (then winnowing) strong source materials; sketching out (then refining) new ways to communicate a topic; and envisioning (then codifying) assignments that will fairly assess whether (then how much) the students are learning. What's not the same: The need to eliminate all ambiguity in instructions, given the lack of face-to-face clarification. There is also the need to decide three months ahead of time what will be in the final lecture, given the production constraints; and there is the need to try to avoid overly idiomatic English phrasemaking, given the worldwide audience of non-native speakers. ...
