e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Coursera

  • MOOC history as presented at AACN13 conference

    With all of the great discussions spawned by the “greatest MOOC conference in the history of MOOCs” (MRI13), it seems a good time to share a segment of a keynote presentation I gave last year on MOOC history. This presentation was at the American Association of the Colleges of Nursing (AACN) conference in April 2013. For context, I had just shared how online education was no longer an issue kept in the corner, away from mainstream higher ed, but was now affecting the traditional campus discussions.

    There is a relevant graphic that was shown during this segment of the talk, showing the MOOC timeline (updated version shown below).

    MOOCpreHistory20131202

  • About those U Penn MOOC results reported at MRI13

    Michael and I have been at the MOOC Research Initiative conference in Arlington, TX (#mri13) for the past three days. Actually, thanks to the ice storm it turns out MRI is the Hotel California of conferences.

    13th_Floor_-_Hotel_California

    credit: Bailey Carter assignment for Laura Gibbs’ class

    While I’m waiting to find out which fine Texas hotel dinner I might enjoy tonight, I thought it would be worthwhile to share more information from the University of Pennsylvania research that seems to be the focus of media reports on the conference (see Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, and eCampusNews, for example). Penn has tracked approximately one million students through their 17 first-generation MOOCs on Coursera, which provided the foundation for this research.

    Per IHE:

    “Emerging data … show that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads.

    For anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the MOOC space over the past year, those conclusions hardly qualify as revelations. Yet some presenters said they felt the first day of the conference served as an opportunity to confirm some of those commonly held beliefs about MOOCs.

    While it is accurate that these basic observations have been made in the past, there was some additional information from U Penn worth considering. The following slide images are courtesy of Laura Perna, a member of the research team.

    (more…)

  • Combining MOOC Student Patterns Graphic with Stanford Analysis

    In part 1, part 2, and part 3 of this series of posts on MOOC student patterns, I shared a description of five student patterns emerging from open-enrollment MOOCs (excluding those with an associated student fee) based on anecdotal data.  In part 4 I compared the overall course completion pattern against an MIT study of the first edX MOOC, leading to some validation of the general shape of when participants drop out.

    Combined MOOC patterns

    The model and typology has gained traction recently, being referenced in both the Government of Ontario’s  environmental scan and literature review [pp 32-33, 40] as well as the British government’s The Maturing of the MOOC literature review [pp 26-28]. So that means it’s time to update and keep people on their toes.

    (more…)

  • Two MOOC curriculum announcements in one week

    In two apparently unrelated announcements, both MIT and Wharton announced they were moving beyond just courses and putting significant parts of their curriculum into MOOC platforms, both with identity verification. MIT is putting several undergraduate sequences online through MITx (their implementation of  edX), while Wharton business school is putting a “foundation series” of first-year courses online through Coursera.

    First the MIT news from Inside Higher Ed (see the Chronicle for additional coverage):

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will this fall package some of its online courses into more cohesive sequences, just as edX prepares to roll out certificates of completion using identity verification. Seen together, the two announcements may provide a glimpse at what the future holds for the massive open online course provider.

    The “XSeries” sequences add a new layer of structure to MITx, the institution’s section of the edX platform. The first of seven courses in the Foundations of Computer Science XSeries will be offered this fall, with one or more new courses being rolled out each semester until the fall of 2015. The Supply Chain Management XSeries, consisting of three courses, will begin in the fall of 2014. The two sequences will target undergraduates and working professionals, respectively. [snip]

    (more…)

  • MOOC Discussion Forums: barrier to engagement?

    Robert McGuire wrote an article for Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, that touches on an important topic – is the centralized discussion forum a barrier to student engagement?

    But more students can also mean more isolation within the crowd. “Online classes can be really lonely places for students if they don’t feel like there’s a community,” notes Maria Andersen, director of learning and research at Instructure, which runs Canvas Network, an open repository where participating schools can deliver their own MOOCs.

    Ironically, the biggest obstacle preventing MOOC students from forming relationships is the feature most relied on to encourage them. Discussion forums are the number one complaint by readers and contributors of MOOC News and Reviews, an online publication devoted to critiquing individual MOOC courses and the evolving MOOC landscape. Most MOOC discussion forums have dozens of indistinguishable threads and offer no way to link between related topics or to other discussions outside the platform. Often, they can’t easily be sorted by topic, keyword, or author. As a result, conversations have little chance of picking up steam, and community is more often stifled than encouraged.

    There are several studies that appear to show that MOOC discussion forums have few students participating and that the forums are dominated by a small number of students.

    (more…)

  • Some validation of MOOC student patterns graphic

    File this under “you read it first on e-Literate”.

    In previous posts from spring 2013 I provided a graphical view on MOOC student patterns based on observed retention over time as well as differing student types. This graphic was based on anecdotal observations of multiple MOOCs, mostly through Coursera.

    studentPatternsInMoocs3-2

     

    Based on a recent study of the edX Circuits and Electronics MOOC, there is this interesting chart of student patterns based on actual data analysis of the 155k students from the spring 2012 offering of this course. The full report is worth reading, by the way, with some real student pattern insights.

    edX Retention

     

    I took this chart and overlaid it on the MOOC student patterns graphic, scaling for 0% / 100% of enrollment vertically and start / stop of course horizontally.

    Combined MOOC patterns

     

    It’s good to see this validation of the overall retention pattern based on real data analysis to augment the original graphic’s model.

  • Coursera Raises $43m, LMS and MOOC Collision In Learning Platform Market

    Today Coursera announced their new round of fund raising, as reported at GigaOm:

    Just last year, online education startup Coursera raised $22 million in venture funding, but the Mountain View-based company is topping up its coffers once again.

    On Wednesday, the startup said it had raised $43 million in a Series B round of financing from an impressive and interesting group of investors, including education-centric investors GSV Capital and Learn Capital, well-known Russian investor Yuri Milner, the International Finance Corporation (which is the investment arm of the World Bank) and Laureate Education, a for-profit higher education provider formerly known as Sylvan Learning.

    Besides the size of the funding, what strikes me is that one of the emerging trends is that MOOCs are becoming more and more of a learning platform, adding many of the basic features of an LMS.

    (more…)