Security Plan: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

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Introduction
This security plan will deal with the risk associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs.) Several security issues are involved with MOOCs. By their very definition MOOCs are course open and free, (Herold,2013) thus making them a security risk from outside the district but also open to abuse from within the network framework.
MOOCs generally free and open to the public at large, (Herold, 2013) this raises many concerns about data breaching and untested resources on the district network. Some of the network concerns that need to be address are overburdening the network and content filtering.
MOOCs, especially at the K-12 level, an evolving concept, this security plan evaluates the district acceptable use policy to evaluate the district policies for asynchronous tools. This plan also looks at what policies apply to digital content and students taking any online courses, particularly MOOCs.
Acceptable Use Policy
In the fall of 2013 Pleasanton ISD revised it acceptable use policy and retitled it a responsible use policy. This was done to reflect the newly adopted Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Policy.
As part of the reversion several things were changed in the RUP. Chief among these revisions was allowing more student access to online content. Specifically, granulated filtering gradually allows more access to the network, as students get older. When discussing MOOCs and online course this becomes important because of the open nature of both types of learning.
Social networking are vital to MOOCs and the current district RUP would need to be rework to allow students to access these resources at the very least at the high school level.(New,2013)
As a part of the security plan these asynchronous tools could pose serio...

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...e and to minimize risk to the system.
The biggest obstacle to implementing MOOCs and online courses is the age of the current network. Implementation of these courses would tax the network beyond its current capacity.
Though the restriction of the RUP can be easily overcome until the current network and bandwidth issues are addressed MOOCS and online course cannot be implemented at PISD.

Works Cited

Herold, B. ((2013, June 24)2013, June 24). Moocs to bring personalized learning, big changes to k-12, ed. professor predicts. Retrieved from http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2013/06/moocs_to_bring_personalized_le.html?qs=mooc

New, J. (2013, November 1). Social media could help MOOCs, Facebook executive says - eCampus News | eCampus News. eCampus News. Retrieved November 30, 2013, from http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/social-facebook-moocs-002/

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