These are short courses offered by publishers either in affiliation with recognised educational providers, or independently. The publisher’s incentive is to understand learners in the subject areas covered by their regular publications, and to engage consumers in extended learning activities. For the learner, these courses offer self-directed learning for professionals, with institutional affiliation providing respectable ‘leisure learning’ products.
Themes
Comments
- Tony Hirst on Publisher led mini-courses
- admin on Seamless learning
- Nataly on Seamless learning
- George on MOOCs
- Muvaffak GOZAYDIN on MOOCs
Admin
Not sure when this first appeared? Online courses from the O’Reilly School of Technology – http://www.oreillyschool.com/
“The O’Reilly School of Technology offers Professional Development Certificate Programs in information technology and related skills. You can earn a Certificate of Professional Development from O’Reilly Media by successfully completing selected series of courses from the O’Reilly School of Technology.”
A job ad appearing on the Guardian website, 11/10/12 [ http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/job/4516186/director-of-studies/ ]:
“Director of Studies
“Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies
“Fixed term for 15 months in the first instance
“£45486 – £52706 per annum
“You will support the development of skills required to be a journalist in a digital world. Autumn 2013 will see Guardian News & Media launch a Masters course in Journalism with Digital Media. The academic programme will run in partnership with, and be validated by, Cardiff University.
“We are now actively looking for a Director of Studies to lead the build and delivery of all aspects of this academic programme.
“The Director of Studies will take responsibility for the delivery and overall success of this diverse teaching programme working in partnership with the Guardian News & Media.”
An interesting development – Pearson announces ‘Pearson College‘ , for-profit HE provision with degrees validated by established HEIs.
Although not related directly at informal or partnered HE/FE/lifelong learning hookups, I notice today that News Corp has announced a K12 education play – Amplify -in association with AT&T: http://www.amplify.com/press-release
This is presumably a punt on the future of the US K12 textbook market (“Amplify is creating new digital curricula that reinvent teaching and learning”) that will combine new content with user tracking/learning analytics (“Amplify focuses on educational analytics and formative assessment”) via a tablet (enabling rich/interactive content as well as helping feed the analysis engines).
There doesn’t seem to be any mention of doing formal/summative assessment (would that raise conflict of interests if Amplify – or News Corp – were to acquire an assessment company (a sector that seems to have been going through a period of global rationalisation through acquisition?)
There’s an interesting comment by Stephen Downes in the context of a post about Coursera-like MOOC business models: “I think the idea is to create a place where there are a lot of people – the online learning environment.”
A cornerstone of the economics of the traditional news media business has been to selling audiences to advertisers and marketers, and it’s quite possible that this will form a part of the business model for online distributed course platforms. If search terms are sold because they are an indication of intent or intention (cf. eg John Battelle on the Database of Intentions), to what extent might taking part in an online course signal actual commitment to an intention? (Does that make sense? I think I need to revisit a bit of agent theory…!)
Which is to say: taking a course demonstrates a strong commitment, rather than a weak intention signalled by a search term, and as such may be more valuable to someone who sells such signals?
Here’s another thought that builds on the notion of education as an audience delivery mechanism: if we take as a starting point that the likes of Coursera are in part motivated by the desire to sell audiences to advertisers, recruiters, etc, then we may be able to use a similar lens to look at the business models of our academic institutions. Freshers fairs, the milk round and alumni associations are all ways that universities sell (or give away) audience, but might we start to see more agressive ‘alternative funding’ business models built around this? Might we see the emergence of an alumni complement to UCAS that markets graduate communities segmented howsoever (there’s already an “audience research” agency in place – HESA…; let’s just hope we don’t see the formalisation of degree based, Klout-style “perks”!)?
In the context of the current report, how does this all relate to pedagogy? At the level of curriculum, maybe the sale of audiences will act as a signal into curriculum development (courses as product lines (a consequence of education as business?)).
(Other forms of this signal also feed back to potential audience members/students – for example, easy access to KIS data will provide potential students with signal relating to the employability of graduates on a particular course (but remember: “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Does the KIS widget include that warning?!).
“One incentive for publishers to invest in short courses is that they develop an appreciation of learners as consumers in subject areas covered by their regular publications, so engaging them at a deeper level than as readers of magazines or textbooks”
An interesting development, if they really are ‘courses’, but shouldn’t that be ‘consumers as learners’? Otherwise it is a diminished, not an enhanced way of conceptualising the end-user.