For four years I learned to be a toucan
For four years, I got a brief glimpse into the life of a toucan, by learning to be one. Four years ago Tonia and I acquired Pogo, a not-yet-weaned keel-billed toucan. We lost her yesterday in a freak...
View ArticleViewpoint: MOOCs can strengthen academia
[Now that I'm the Academic Director for online learning at Berkeley, I figured it's OK to raise my voice a little about what I think is good about MOOCs. The following was submitted as a "Viewpoint"...
View ArticleYou’re an idiot if you don’t think gun laws need to be reformed
Sorry, but you are. I’m astounded by the ideological rigidity that has apparently so immobilized some people—including some I normally think of as perceptive and intelligent—that prevents them from...
View ArticleWhat was it like to teach a MOOC?
Since I get asked this question a lot, including by the media, I thought it’d be useful to blog it. What MOOCs have I taught? I split our 15-week on-campus software engineering course into two pieces,...
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The traveling MOOC professor
I just returned from a short but much-needed vacation to Thailand and Indonesia, with a brief stopover in Singapore. (My wife and I are scuba divers, so we were diving in the Raja Ampat area of...
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Meeting some MOOC students in Paris
Last week I traveled to Paris for CHI 2013 to speak on a panel about online education. I’m getting to do that a lot these days, and while the travel can be tiring, it’s certainly more fun when I get...
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How I got my MIT 6.004 nerd kit past airport security
As an undergrad at MIT in the late 80s, in my Digital Design and Computer Architecture courses we actually built stuff using discrete TTL parts on high-end protoboards with integrated power supplies....
View ArticleWhat to expect when teaching your first MOOC
Now that the media seems to have exhausted the “MOOC honeymoon” stories, they’re looking for “MOOC disaster” stories. Two recent high-profile stories involve the truncation of a Georgia Tech MOOC due...
View ArticleLetter to the editor of SF Chronicle re: SJSU “disappointing” online...
I submitted this to the San Francisco Chronicle today in response to an op-ed critiquing the “disappointing” performance of the Udacity/SJSU MOOC experiment: TO THE EDITOR: Your commentary on San Jose...
View ArticleedX, Google, and MOOC.org
(This entry is being cross-posted to the Berkeley Teaching Blog.) A few days ago Google and edX announced a new collaboration: Google will own and operate MOOC.org, a new site that will host the Open...
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