News Story

The Online Learning Debate: Guardian Event

KMi Reporter, Monday 26 Nov 2012

The latest Guardian Sponsored online learning debate on "pedagogy, technology and opening up higher education", featured KMi Director – Prof Peter Scott and IET Director – Prof Josie Taylor discussing MOOCs and online learning with a number of eminent participants including Sir John Daniel (a past OU Vice Chancellor).

The Sponsored Q&A session was run as a live text chat on the Guardian Website on Friday 23 November from 12-2pm GMT. With the launch in December 2011 of MITx and recently here in the UK University of Edinburgh’s decision to join the Coursera, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have excited higher educational thinkers. The technology for the discussion today was primitive but effective – with no audio visual meeting technology, but simply an unthreaded ‘blog-like’ text chat interaction between the ‘higher education network’ members. (See the link below).

With 207 comments, 183 tweets and 89 Facebook shares, the debate sparked significant interest in the Guardian Higher Education Network community, even beyond the event itself… and it will continue to generate excitement.