MOOC platforms like Udacity and Coursera do not readily define the educational theories and pedagogies they employ. It might be nice to see those topics explicitly, but a close reading of mission statements and institutional beliefs can help us determine how such ventures see learning. Course2Go, a new online learning platform through Stanford University (that advertises itself as an open-source project), lists some of the hot features of taking a course over their platform:
Here’s what you will like about Class2Go:
- Videos from Stanford professors with interactive in-video quizzes give you a chance to learn from Stanford professors and then practice what you’ve learned.
- Formative and summative exercises built on the Khan Academy’s exercise framework provide new formats for taking your learning to the next level.
- Frame extracting allows you to preview and navigate to specific parts of videos. Scroll through extracted frames underneath a video to quickly find what you’re looking for.
- Love discussion forums? We’ve added Piazza forums to get people talking.
The focus on quizzes, Khan Academy and videos leads to didactic, behaviorist notions of learning. Do a Google search of Khan Academy Pedagogy and see the results: educational theorists and researchers see little value in the approach beyond rote memorization and fact finding. Perhaps this blog needs to dive more into Khan Academy to see the pedagogy behind these MOOCs.
All MOOCs, All The Time 