Distance Lerarning | News

Oregon State U Offers MOOC for K-12 Educators

• By Leila Meyer
• 06/17/14

Oregon State University (OSU) will offer its first massive open online course (MOOC) this fall in partnership with Stanford University and the Oregon Department of Education.

The course, Supporting English Language Learners under New Standards, will begin on October 1 and run for eight weeks. According to the university, it's intended to help K-12 teachers support English language learners, and it will focus on how English language learners construct claims supported by evidence, which is a key practice in both the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and English Language Proficiency (ELP) Standards.

The course is open to teachers from around the world but may be of particular interest to those from the 11-state ELPA21 consortium, which is developing an assessment system based on the ELP Standards. Educators participating in the course will work in teams to gather and analyze language samples from their students to discover how students construct claims supported by evidence. The course aims to help participants design standards-aligned curriculum that they can apply in their own classrooms.

The course will be taught by instructors from OSU and Stanford. Stanford University was one of the first universities to offer MOOCs. While OSU has offered online education for some time, this course will be its first venture into the world of MOOCs. "This will help us learn first-hand about this type of a teaching platform and identify how and where MOOCs fit in our learning ecosystem,” said Sabah Randhawa, provost and executive vice president of OSU, in a prepared statement.

The Supporting English Language Learners under New Standards MOOC will be offered free of charge and will open for registration later this summer. Further information about the course is available on OSU's site.