…has hit 6,000! The course is free – take a look. Enroll.

If you want to look at a sample lecture, I’d recommend Lecture 11, Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden.

…UD‘s poetry MOOC, for which you can sign up here. It’s free.

… is here. (Registration required.)

I now have over a thousand students.

The lecture is about T.S. Eliot’s poem, “Virginia” —

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river, river, river.

… my latest lecture for the MOOC I’m giving appears. Here it is.

It’s a reading of Charles Wright’s poem, Black Zodiac.

My MOOC on poetry is almost up to nine hundred. If you want to check it out, go here.

Title: Love, and the Arrest of Life

If you haven’t yet enrolled in UD‘s poetry MOOC, feel free.

As Berkeley makes its own MOOC moves, this distinction is crucial: Free, open-sourced MOOCS are a public service, an investigation into certain technologies, a way of broadcasting your university’s name to the world, a democratizing gesture. Monetized credit-bearing online courses have impossibly high rates of cheating, are often cheaply done and poorly staffed, with one (frequently part-time) faculty drudge (I call these people air traffic controllers) responsible for hundreds of students, etc. They are hard to distinguish from the tax-syphoning, for-profit, shames-of-a-nation. (Scroll down.)

Faculty leaders have cautioned the university against moving too quickly with the online courses. The UC Academic Senate has said it worries about the quality and finances of the UC Online project.

In contrast, some of those most concerned about UC’s plans say they support free projects like Coursera and edX.

UD is interviewed about MOOCs in the George Washington University newspaper.

… now has eight hundred students.

It’s part of Udemy’s Faculty Project, and can be found here. (Remember: You need to register.)

… now has over seven hundred students.

… in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

UD‘s friend Jonathan sent her news of the sudden resignation of the president of the University of Virginia. UD was intrigued by this part of the university’s official statement about her departure:

We also believe that higher education is on the brink of a transformation now that online delivery has been legitimized by some of the elite institutions.

There’s more stuff in the statement about needing “a much faster pace of change.”

Obviously Virginia’s MOOC policy wasn’t a central part of this decision, but UD finds it striking that the university singled it out. It suggests that all ambitious universities are – or should be? – thinking about MOOCs.

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For UD‘s series of posts on her own MOOC, go here.

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Related.

… on poetry is now up.

Title: What Are They Trying to Tell Us?

… in this article about MOOCs.