There’s more to the Big Ten than athletics. The
universities that make up the oldest Division I athletic conference also
operate the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) with the University of
Chicago, a consortium of research universities that produce 16% of the massive
open online courses (MOOCs) offered by Coursera.
Now, the CIC members are proposing a collaborative online
network that would expand the CourseShare program. The collaboration would also
put the schools in a position to develop of tools, courses, and applications
instead of counting on technology and MOOC companies to create the innovations.
“To meet our objective of using online platforms to
improve instruction quality, we need to harness campus creativity and expertise
to rethink the underlying methods and aims of instruction,” provosts from the
CIC member schools said in a joint statement.