MOOCs have exploded! by John Johnson.
From the post:
About a year and two months ago, Stanford University taught three classes online: Intro to Databases, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. I took two of those classes (I did not feel I had time to take Artificial Intelligence), and found them very valuable. The success of those programs led to the development of at least two companies in a new area of online education: Coursera and Udacity. In the meantime, other efforts have been started (I’m thinking mainly edX, but there are others as well), and now many universities are scrambling to take advantage of either the framework of these companies or other platforms.
Put simply, if you have not already, then you need to make the time to do some of these classes. Education is the most important investment you can make in yourself, and at this point there are hundreds of free online university-level classes in everything from the arts to statistics. If ever you wanted to expand your horizons, now’s the time.
John mentions that the courses require self-discipline. For enrollment of any size, that would be true of the person offering the course as well.
If you have taken one or more MOOCs, I am interested to hear your thoughts on teaching topic maps via a MOOC.
The syntaxes look amenable to the mini-test with automated grading style of testing. Could subject a topic map to parsing validity.
Would that be enough? As a mini-introduction to topic maps?
Saving in-depth discussion of semantics, identity and such for smaller settings?