Lughnasa Harvest Moon
Cooling down. Again. Good. But. I’m waiting for a light frost to plant my garlic. Looks like I might wait a while.
ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry) has given a lot of thought to pedagogy. They’ve imagined ways to get folks to interact in non-judgmental ways, no grades or points on the essays, for example. The essays themselves will be peer-reviewed by at least 4 fellow students (the norm for MOOCS) and Modpo will post, after the essays are in, a close reading video on the poem about which we wrote our essays. In addition, the essays and their assessments will be posted to forums.
(Douris. Man with wax tablet)
The forums themselves, which encourage discussion of individual poems, are open-ended and helpful. A part of getting a certificate is posting to at least one thread on a particular poem each week. This pushes each of us to engage the online discussion. A good push. Otherwise I might ignore the forums or be a lurker. This is an each-one teach one pedagogy with quality information and guidance. Perfect, from my perspective.
In other MOOC news this week MIT plans to start offering what it calls Xseries classes. In the first instance this will be seven MOOCS on computer programming and networking. At the end, for $100 a class, $700 total, the student can get a certificate of learning from MIT. They consider the Xseries to be equivalent to maybe 2-4 classes on campus. This is exciting because it begins to open the door to degrees earned through MOOCS for little cash, making high quality education available to more and more people.
None of the MOOC entities, Coursera, Udacity or Edx, are, as the article announcing the Xseries said, universities, but the Xseries suggest that sentence could have ended with yet.
What an exciting time of autodidacts everywhere.
