Massive Open Online Courses: A New Direction in Online Education
By Karla Robinson
November 7, 2012
November 7, 2012
- If you don’t know what a MOOC is, you soon will as massive open online courses continue to proliferate through higher education, attracting noteworthy numbers of students as well as top universities.
- “I like to call this the year of disruption and the year is not over yet,” says Anant Agarwal, president of non-profit educational startup edX, which has 370,000 students enrolled this fall.
- Another MOOC provider Coursera launched this January and has already attracted 1.7 million users, growing faster than Facebook according to founder and Stanford professor Andrew Ng.
- “MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events,” notes The New York Times, “but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.”
- Many courses see a high number of signups, but a smaller number of certificates awarded as students drop off. There is also limited faculty interaction because of the volume of students, so users have to rely more heavily on other students for help.
- “But the vibe is decidedly Facebook — build a profile, upload your photo — with tools for students to plan ‘meet-ups’ with Courserians in about 1,400 cities worldwide,” explains the article. “These gatherings may be bona fide study groups or social sessions. Membership may be many or sparse.”
- The MOOCs also peer-source the grading; each student grades five others’ work and scores for each user are averaged out. Those who give inaccurate grades are flagged and their scores count for less. Cheating has been a concern, leading to proctored exams.
2 Comments
David Stevens of MOOC provider Udacity expects much more disruption of education; “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”
David Stevens of MOOC provider Udacity expects much more disruption of education; “We are only 5 to 10 percent of the way there.”
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.