Proponents and practitioners of the open web also bear responsibility for the missed opportunities in higher education. In retrospect, temperamental preferences for DIY culture, relentless tinkering and experimentation, and indulging the delightful paradoxes of ill-structured problems has not served to promote the adoption of open online tools in the wider culture. Whereas innovators and early adopters tend to have a relatively high tolerance for chaos, higher education as a whole does not (and arguably cannot). Railing against the academy's failure to embrace a perceived risk can be dismal fun for many of us, but an honest appraisal of our own missteps has to be in the mix.
This fall, MIT Professor Shigeru Miyagawa flipped his classroom as he taught two versions of Visualizing Japan to two distinctive audiences at the same time. He co-taught the massive online open course (MOOC) VJx on edX, as well as the residential version of the course, 21F.027, to students at MIT. The students in the residential class were assigned the MOOC video lectures and quizzes to complement their classroom work.
The focus is however mostly on the high profile xMOOC interpretations of Coursera, edX etc rather than on the more undercover collaborative MOOCs offered by networks of teachers.
J. Kim, P. Guo, D. Seaton, P. Mitros, K. Gajos, and R. Miller. Proceedings of the First ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale Conference, page 31–40. New York, NY, USA, Association for Computing Machinery, (2014)