Okay, pretty much in the order of the headline here:
- As you can tell from the sidebar of this site, More than a Moment is getting closer to release and it’s now available for order from amazon, the UPC/USUP web site, and wherever books are sold. PLUS if you order it from the publisher’s web site and enter the promo code KRAU, there’s a 40% discount. That puts the price at around $14. I have to say this is one of the reasons why I really didn’t want this book to end up being published by an academic press that sell books for $60 or more.
- I’ve set up a Facebook page for the book here: https://www.facebook.com/moocbook/ Among other things, I’m planning on making more use of that page (and less use of this site) to do things like post updates, news, and whatever else. I have a lot of mixed feelings about Facebook, but the reality is it’s still the best place online to find an audience and to promote. So Facebook it is.
- But I do have a few links about MOOCs and their aftermath to share here:
- “The Next Purdue-Kaplan Deal?” is about the fuzzy future of Ashford University, which was supposed to be the next for-profit to be taken over by a non-profit and then morph into an OPM.
- The headline here is “Community College, With Google as Instructor,” but I wonder if what’s really going on is Google is trying to compete (and likely overwhelm) the likes of Coursera and Udacity, companies who have been trying to partner with community colleges and the like to sell their courses as curriculum.
- Finally, an article I need to read a bit more carefully and I’ll probably write about in more detail. From The Century Foundation, “Dear Colleges: Take Control of Your Online Courses” by Stephanie Hall and Taela Dudley. In the book, I quote a fair amount from a 2017 article from The Century Foundation, “The Private Side of Public Higher Education,” which both warns about OPMs and specifically mentions EMU and Michigan State.