It turns out MOOC activity declines year-over-year in similar fashion to course participation per week, based on new research from MIT and Harvard.
Harvard
Miami, Harvard and MIT: Disability discrimination lawsuits focused on schools as content providers
In the discussions at Google+ based on last week’s post about the Miami University of Ohio disability discrimination lawsuit ((Insert joke here about G+ and its hundreds of active users.)), George Station made two important points that deserve more visibility. It’s been a-coming for several years now. Cal State has some pretty strong rules in place for […]
The Quotable Justin Reich: MOOC research needs to reboot
Thanks to Audrey Watters I just read a new article in Science Magazine and publicly posted here by Justin Reich, the lead researcher for HarvardX (Harvard’s implementation of edX and associated research team) ((Note that Science Magazine access requires a subscription or purchase or individual article.)). Justin calls out the limitations of current MOOC research that focuses on A/B […]
No, I don’t believe that Harvard or MIT are hiding edX data
Since my Sunday post What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics, there have been a few comments with a common theme about Harvard and MIT perhaps withholding any learner-centered analytics data. As a recap, my argument was: Beyond data aggregated over the entire course, the Harvard and MIT edX […]
What Harvard and MIT could learn from the University of Phoenix about analytics
Last week Harvard and MIT released de-identified data from their edX-based MOOCs. Rather than just produce a summary report, the intent of this release was to open up the data and share it publicly. While it is good to see this approach to Open Data, unfortunately the data set is of limited value, and it actually illustrates […]
Harvard Faculty Request Faculty Oversight of HarvardX (Their Usage of edX)
Yesterday, 58 faculty members from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard wrote an open letter to the dean requesting faculty oversight of HarvardX. When schools sign up for edX, their implementations tend to be called SchoolX, thus HarvardX specifically refers to their usage of the MOOC platform, not to the overall edX organization. […]
MOOCs in 2012: Dismantling the Status Quo
The dominant story in higher education for 2012 was clearly the rise of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), particularly the xMOOCs such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. There has been a lot of debate on the merits of xMOOCs in terms of disruption, business model and academic quality. While I think these questions are interesting, […]