Open Universities Australia MOOCs

Open Universities Australia (OUA), are offering nine free on-line courses on their Open2Study page. This appears to be OUA's response to the media attention over Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Open2Study appears to be implemented with Drupal. One of the courses which got my attention is "Writing for the Web" by Frankie Madden. This is run over four weeks, with about nine videos and quizzes per week. The suggested study time is 2 to 4 hours per week, which is much less than a typical university course (about 12 hours a week).

What I could not find out from the web site was how members of the OUA consortia of universities offer a course. The Green Technology Strategies course I designed for the Australian Computer Society's Computer Professional Education Program, is offered through OUA. I was thinking of creating some video content and quizzes, which could be used as part of that course and be used on their own as a short free MOOC. I did create a short version of the course "How Green is My Computer?" but this assumed the student would read text notes and respond to a text based forum with a human tutor.

It might be interesting to see if the cost of creating the video and quizzes for a MOOC could be funded with Crowdfunding. Matthew Benetti at Pozible.com is interested in hearing from universities interested in Crowdfunding a MOOC.