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 […]
EdX
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. Based on a recent study of […]
LMS Market Update: May and June News
There have been a number of LMS and Learning Platform announcements over the past month or two that will help shape the market over the next year or more. One trend I’ve described is the transition from an LMS market to a Learning Platform market, which includes a broader scope of products. Below are some of […]
MOOCs Beyond Professional Development: Coursera’s Big Announcement in Context
One aspect of last week’s Coursera announcement was the acknowledgement that MOOCs to date have primarily served as a mechanism for professional development, not as a mechanism for serving higher education per se. In the Chronicle article: Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, acknowledged that the company was venturing into new terrain. After studying their MOOC […]