:: The 4th Era ::

Today’s big news is that Coursera, the largest of the MOOC providers, has signed with 10 public statewide systems.

Anya Kamenetz writes in Fast Company:

"Coursera is partnering with 10 major public flagship and state university systems, from the State University of New York to West Virginia University, that collectively enroll 1.25 million of the nation’s 21 million college students. Coursera’s existing university partnerships with schools like Stanford and Penn mainly involve professors creating and offering online courses to several million users on the platform. These new public partnerships, however, are aimed at using MOOCs to enhance teaching, learning, and collaboration not only for online students around the world, but also for students already physically attending classes at these universities, and high school students who hope to enroll there."

"The modern learner has to sift through a lot of information.

That means higher level thinking skills like analysis and evaluation are necessary just to reduce all the noise and establish the credibility of information.

"There is also the matter of utility. Evaluating information depends as much on context and circumstance as it does the nature of the data itself. The essay full of fluff may distill quite nicely down to a 140 character tweet. A trivial fact about governments may appear useless in a research paper on the 3 branches of government, but could find utility in a project-based learning artifact on the evolution of government systems worldwide."