Sarah,

I was concerned that the university was requesting my formal permission to speak with my students. I would appreciate an informal request or simple notification. The problem with formal permission is in a scenario where  a professor does not want anyone to know what is happening in his/her course and researchers are doing an investigation. A prof has every right to not co-operate but he/she has no right to prevent anyone asking questions.

All the best.

Rory

Oh, for sure. I could scrape up a couple of plausible reasons, but I don't find either especially compelling. 

I was just curious about your claim that asking permission goes against the spirit of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Whether it does or not, that doesn't mean asking permission is a good idea -- I'm just interested in the ways we leverage "rights" and their enforcement in academic and research contexts. The libertarian-style argument that I can say anything I want to anyone I want because I have freedom of speech isn't quite what the Charter provides. Whether or not Canadian courts will hear an issue as a Charter issue (and give the person complaining standing to make the case) is a big deal. 

I did a search to learn more about whether access to research subjects might be covered by freedom of expression, and I didn't find anything about that, but I found a good summary of some related issues in an opinion on Charter protection of privacy and the confidentiality of academic research, and a couple of bulletins from CAUT about academic freedom and freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and the Quebec student strikes. It was a neat way to get sidetracked from what I should be doing! I'm glad you provided an excuse to look it up, and I would be very curious to hear more about how academic research and the Charter have interacted. 

It's worth distinguishing between cMOOCs and xMOOCs, as George Siemens has done at http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/.

cMOOCs are the original and (IMHO) best, using connectivist methods and, most importantly, actually relying on the massiveness to add value: it is vital to the way they work that there is a crowd of learners helping one another to learn and there would be no learning to speak of without that crowd. I think these really are very different in most important ways from the traditional models.

xMOOCs, the upstarts that largely follow the old, industrial patterns of instructivist delivery, are indeed very similar from a teaching perspective to the older variants with the important distinction that, unlike old variants, they are free as in beer - well, at least until serious accreditation comes into the picture. However, from a learning perspective they are potentially very different, at least for those that seek the difference, because the affordances of the read/write web surround them with networks and communities that form a more complex ecosystem, with richer ways of supporting learning than older variants. 

As always, new technologies assemble the old in different ways and that means there are lots of familiar things and similarities that are worth mentioning. But they are not quite the same.