Coming soon/by the CCCCs: Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses

I am happy to report that the book of essays that Charlie Lowe and I have been editing is that much closer to being out. It’s called Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses, it’s being published by Parlor Press, and it ought to be available at the CCCCs.

This collection was imagined/conceived less than a year ago, at the CCCCs in Las Vegas, and I like to think it takes a slightly different take on MOOCs, at least different from what I’ve seen in the educational press, MSM, and the blogosphere. These are not essays from administrators, entrepreneurs, and/or pundits who have little to no experience teaching (online or elsewhere) and who haven’t been a student in any sense since their days as an undergraduate. Rather, the contributors here have all been involved in MOOCs as critical observers, students, and MOOC professors. This is not a collection of essays written squarely around the theme of “MOOCs will be the end of us all” or “MOOCs will be the grand savior of higher education. Rather, these essays examine, reflect, and (even though I kind of want to avoid this word) problematize the simple polemic of MOOCs.

It’s a fairly “comp/rhet”-centric collection since that’s the field/discipline that Charlie and I know, though we also have been able to draw some contributors from a few other fields as well. We were also lucky enough to have contributions from faculty who developed, taught, and otherwise oversaw some MOOCs in the last year or so: The E-Learning and Digital Cultures course from the University of Edinburgh, English Composition I: Achieving Expertise from Duke University, Writing II: Rhetorical Composing from Ohio State University, First-Year Composition 2.0 from Georgia Tech, and  Michigan State University’s Writing MOOC.

I’ve included the Table of Contents after the break:

 

“Introduction: Building on the Tradition of CCK08,” Charles Lowe

“MOOCology 1.0,” Glenna L. Decker

“Framing Questions about MOOCs and Writing Courses,” James E. Porter

“A MOOC or Not a MOOC: ds106 Questions the Form,” Alan Levine

“Why We Are Thinking About MOOCs,” Jeffrey T. Grabill

“The Hidden Costs of MOOCs,” Karen Head

“Coursera: Fifty Ways to Fix the Software (with apologies to Paul Simon),” Laura Gibbs

“Being Present in a University Writing Course: A Case Against MOOCs,” Bob Samuels

“Another Colonialist Tool?” Aaron Barlow

“MOOCversations: Commonplaces as Argument,” Jeff Rice

“MOOC Feedback: Pleasing All the People?” Jeremy Knox, Jen Ross, Christine Sinclair, Hamish Macleod, and Siân Bayne

“More Questions than Answers: Scratching at the Surface of MOOCs in Higher Education,” Jacqueline Kauza

“Those Moot MOOCs: My MOOC Experience,” Melissa Syapin

“MOOC Assigned,” Steven D. Krause

“Learning How to Teach … Differently: Extracts from a MOOC Instructor’s Journal,” Denise K. Comer

“MOOC as Threat and Promise,” Edward M. White

“A MOOC With a View: How MOOCs Encourage Us to Reexamine Pedagogical Doxa,” Kay Halasek, Ben McCorkle, Cynthia L. Selfe, Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Susan Delagrange, Jennifer Michaels, and Kaitlin Clinnin

“Putting the U in MOOCs: The Importance of Usability in Course Design,” Heather Noel Young

“‘I open at the close’: A Post-MOOC Meta-Happening Reflection and What I’m Going to Do About That,” Elizabeth D. Woodworth

“Here a MOOC, There a MOOC,” Nick Carbone

“Writing and Learning with Feedback Machines,” Alexander Reid

“Learning Many-to-Many: The Best Case for Writing in Digital Environments,” Bill Hart-Davidson

“After the Invasion: What’s Next for MOOCs?” Steven D. Krause

10 thoughts on “Coming soon/by the CCCCs: Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Open Online Courses”

Leave a Reply to OnlineCrsLady Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.