logo
EverydayChaos
Everyday Chaos
Too Big to Know
Too Big to Know
Cluetrain 10th Anniversary edition
Cluetrain 10th Anniversary
Everything Is Miscellaneous
Everything Is Miscellaneous
Small Pieces cover
Small Pieces Loosely Joined
Cluetrain cover
Cluetrain Manifesto
My face
Speaker info
Who am I? (Blog Disclosure Form) Copy this link as RSS address Atom Feed

June 11, 2016

Keeping MOOCs open—platforms vs. protocols

Tarun Vagani reports that Coursera has served notice that it is closing its archive of prior MOOCs (massive open online courses). As Coursera put it in an email:

Effective June 30, 2016, courses on the old platform will no longer be available.

Also, Coursera is phasing out its free certificates to those who successfully complete a course, according to CourseraJunkie.

There’s nothing wrong with a MOOC platform charging for whatever they want to charge for. There is something terribly wrong with the educational system handing power over MOOCs to a commercial entity.

MOOCs are here to stay. But we once again need to learn the danger of centralized platforms. Protocols are safer — more generative, more resistant to capture — than platforms. Distributed archives are safer than centralized archives.

Thank goodness the idea of the Decentalized Web (or, as I prefer to think of it, the Decent Web) is gaining momentum. Not a moment too soon.

Tweet
Follow me

Categories: education, open access Tagged with: decent • mooc Date: June 11th, 2016 dw

Be the first to comment »


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
TL;DR: Share this post freely, but attribute it to me (name (David Weinberger) and link to it), and don't use it commercially without my permission.

Joho the Blog uses WordPress blogging software.
Thank you, WordPress!