Microsoft Office Mix: No-Teacher-Left-Behind Course Authoring 27
theodp (442580) writes "While they aim to democratize learning, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement has, for the most part, oddly left K-12 teachers out of the online content creation business. ZDNet's Simon Bisson reports on Office Mix, Microsoft's new PowerPoint plug-in and associated cloud service, which Bisson says makes it easy to create and distribute compelling educational content (screenshots). GeekWire's Frank Catalano also makes an interesting case for why Office Mix's choice of PowerPoint, "the poster child for delivering boring presentations in non-interactive settings," could still be a disrupter in the online content creation space. By the way, MOOC.org, the collaboration of edX and Google which also aims to help "teachers easily build and host courses for the world to take," is slated to go live in the first half of 2014. It'll be interesting to see how MOOC.org's authoring tools differ from Google Research's Course Builder effort."
The problem isn't PowerPoint itself (Score:5, Insightful)
The only problem with PowerPoint is that anyone can use it, and most people aren't capable of making compelling content. I know some people who can do great things with PowerPoint, but just like any skill, it is only possessed by a small percent of the population. The average person can't sing, dance, cook, act, paint, draw, or code exceptionally well, either. It would be like blaming Word for an abundance of badly-formatted, boring stories.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)