by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
If you are a successful college professor, and someone asks you to turn your course into a MOOC, proceed with great care. These things are not the same.<\/strong><\/p>\n I am currently taking a series of online courses or MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course or is it Massive Online Open Course or is it Massive Opportunity to make Outrageous amounts of Cash?). I am not having a good experience. There are opportunities to learn, and I am learning. There is also, however, great disappointment.<\/p>\n The lectures are sloppy. Some lectures are difficult to understand as the speakers are not native English speakers. Many visuals shown are fuzzy and illegible. The lecturers don’t answer questions.<\/p>\n I caution successful college professors from doing a MOOC. I feel that these persons who come across poorly in the MOOCs are excellent professors and succeed at both research and teaching\u2014in a campus environment.<\/p>\n Specific cautions<\/strong>:<\/p>\n You can’t show slides and just talk as if you were in a classroom. That comes across as sloppy, and the grammar, once transcribed and shown on the screen next to the video, is embarrassing.<\/p>\n Don’t let the production company show your presentation without your final, absolute approval. They will put up any out-of-focus\u00a0 junk to save time and money.<\/p>\n Have a firm agreement on who will answer questions from paying customers. You may need to spend 28 hours a day answering questions. You can’t do that. Hence, you ignore most questions and give poor answers to the rest. You come across as (hmmm, how to say this?) a jerk.<\/p>\n MOOC is not college. MOOC deals with professionals in the workforce. They invest time and money and expect excellence. They are not 18-year-old freshmen who need to be “weeded out” with quips and suggestions to ask another student. And you don’t have a staff of grad students to take care of these things.<\/p>\n Excellent material can be presented in an excellent manner in a MOOC. The MOOC can also present an excellent professor as a bungling, heartless hack. Proceed with caution and feel no fear in marking up the contract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips If you are a successful college professor, and someone asks you to turn your course into a MOOC, proceed with great care. These things are not the same. I am currently taking a series of online courses or MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course or is it Massive Online Open Course or is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,20,104],"tags":[207,142,218],"class_list":["post-2286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-learning","category-mooc","tag-education","tag-learning","tag-mooc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2286"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2287,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions\/2287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}