From FOI Noam Ebner:

Hi everyone,
In a couple of weeks, I will be kicking off an educational adventure down a very unclear path, and I’d like to extend an invitation to all of you to join me.

Between Oct. 17th and Nov. 20th, I will be teaching a basic negotiation course, offered as a MOOC, entitled Negotiation: Navigating Personal and Professional Interactions.

For those of you who have happily managed to avoid the debates roiling across numerous op-eds on this topic, a MOOC is a Massive Online Open Course. In such a course, an educator offers an online course to the world at large, on an internet-based learning platform. However, this is not your typical (can I say “traditional” yet?) format of online learning: Anyone in the world with an internet connection can take the course. There are no prerequisites or screening procedures. Students do not need to belong to your university, or to any university at all. No tuition is charged. Courses do not, for the most part, provide academic credit, although some offer a certificate of completion. Hundreds, or thousands, of students participate in the course from all around the world.

I hope to use this course to begin to figure out whether and how these courses might fit into the educational toolbox of the fields of negotiation and conflict resolution education. Can our material be taught through this medium? How can it best be taught? To what other uses might we put this vehicle, or the materials created for them?

I’d love for you to help me figure those and other questions out. In the spirit I’ve learned from the Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Project, I view this course, to a large extent, both as a laboratory to experiment with methods – and as an aquarium, in which the efficacy of these methods can be viewed from the outside by as many teaching experts as possible. In that sense, I happily pose this course as a dartboard, hoping that others will be willing to cast well-intended and -aimed darts of suggestions for improvement.

You can register for the course by clicking here (it takes only a few seconds to register). The site will then send you a reminder and an invitation to check in, when the course goes live.

I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’d appreciate your thoughts and comments on this – to say nothing of how happy I’d be to see you actually engaging in the class.

Noam