MOOCs are very controversial in universities, not least Penn State. Some people think they are the end of residential college education as we know it. Others, myself included, think they will be a nice addition – and will motivate honest improvements in what we deliver in traditional courses. If you can get from a Stanford professor on-line better than anything I can deliver in person at Penn State, why would you come to Penn State?

The MOOC has been a real hassle all summer. Script deadlines, story boarding deadlines, filming deadlines. Like I needed anything else to do. And now there are more deadlines about glossaries, further reading, quizzes. Groan. But I was really blown away at a meeting we had last week with two of the faculty that have already run MOOCs from Penn State.

It turns out that a significant number of MOOC students – and this can be in the thousands – want extra work, more detail, more contact with professors – in general to go further, faster and higher than the course requirements. It was the inverse of what I experience on campus. Students who paid nothing, who get no transcript, who are not doing it because their parents and their society expect…push themselves. One of the PSU MOOC faculty described it as the most exciting teaching he had ever done.

I look forward to the compare and contrast. Of course, I’ll post my reflections here..