Mcgill gets on online-course bandwagon

MOOCs are coming to McGill University.

These massive open online courses — all the rage in education circles, with The New York Times having dubbed 2012 as The Year of the MOOC — may offer Quebec students the kind of accessibility they’ve been looking for.

That is, the courses are free, although they don’t typically offer academic credit.

McGill will join several universities around the world as a member of the edX consortium, founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

McGill will begin to offer the courses in 2014.

Professors at McGill, working closely with edX teams, will design, develop and deliver MOOCs, with initial course offerings in sciences, humanities and public policy.

MOOCs represent a fastgrowing innovation in higher education. They aim to connect the learning styles and expectations of today’s university students and lifelong learners with state-of-the-art digital learning.

Of course, being technol- ogy-based, MOOCs don’t always go smoothly. There was an example recently when the Georgia Institute of Technology had a course that crashed and had to be suspended.

In describing MOOCs, USA Today said college might never be the same. MOOCs not only widen access to education, but they also help educators enable online learning.

“Membership in the edX consortium ensures access to massive data sets that provide unprecedented opportunities to study how students learn in digital environments, to develop assessment tools for these broadly distributed platforms, and to improve technology-supported learning on campus,” McGill provost Anthony Masi said.

MOOCs are meant to be large-scale and it’s not unusual for courses to have enrolment of 100,000 students.

“We welcome the opportunity to collaborate in the edX consortium, where we join other leading universities as pioneers in digital pedagogy for the global online learning community,” said Heather Munroe-Blum, principal and vice-chancellor of McGill.