e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: MOOC

  • The Most Thorough Summary (to date) of MOOC Completion Rates

    How many times have you heard the statement that ‘MOOCs have a completion rate of 10%’ or ‘MOOCs have a completion rate of less than 10%’? The meme seems to have developed a life of its own, but try to research the original claim and you might find a bunch of circular references or anecdotes of one or two courses. Will the 10% meme hold up once we get more data?

    While researching this question for an upcoming post, I found an excellent resource put together by Katy Jordan, a graduate student at The Open University of the UK. In a blog post from Feb 13, 2013, Katy described a new effort of hers to synthesize MOOC completion rate data – from xMOOCs in particular and mostly from Coursera.

    Via a combination of thinking about ‘what makes a successful MOOC?’, and looking for a topic for my final project on the Infographics MOOC, I decided to try to pull together the various statistics floating around online about MOOC completion rates. I’m trying to see if any differences emerge on the basis of platform or the assessment methods used.

    My draft graph synthesising everything I’ve found so far can be found here: http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html

    What Katy has done so far is compile completion rate data from 24 MOOCs – 19 from Coursera, 3 from edX, 1 from Udacity and 1 from MITx (a precursor to edX). The data is available in a table format or in a graph.

    table

     

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  • The Most Thorough Description (to date) of University Experience with MOOC

    One of the benefits of participating in an interactive event, such as the recent ELI Webinar that Michael and I led yesterday, is that the learning goes both ways. During the webinar, one of the participants shared a link for a report from Duke University on their first MOOC, Bioelectricity: A Quantitative Approach, delivered through Coursera in fall 2012. And what a find that was – this is the most thorough description I have yet seen from a university about their experience selecting, development, delivering and analyzing a MOOC. Kudos to Yvonne Belanger and Jessica Thornton, the authors.

    What follows are some key excerpts along with some observations, but for anyone considering participation in one of the xMOOCs – read the whole report.

    Some of the key findings from the executive summary:

    • Over 600 hours of effort were required to build and deliver the course, including more than 420 hours of effort by the instructor.
    • The course launched on schedule and was successfully completed by hundreds of students. Many hundreds more continued to participate in other ways. The number of students actively participating plateaued at around 1000 per week.
    • Over 12,000 students enrolled, representing more than 100 countries. Approximately 8,000 of these students logged in during the first week.
    • At the time of enrollment, one-third of enrolled students held less than a four year degree, one third held a Bachelors or equivalent, and one-third held an advanced degree.
    • 25% of students who took both Week 1 quizzes successfully completed the course, including 313 students from at least 37 countries. Course completers typically held a Bachelor’s degree or higher; however, at least 10 pre-college students were among those who successfully completed this challenging upper level undergraduate course.
    • Students who did not complete all requirements cited a lack of time, insufficient math background or having intended to only view the lectures from the outset. Regardless of completion status, many students were primarily seeking enjoyment or educational enrichment.
    • Most students reported a positive learning experience and rated the course highly, including ones who did not complete all requirements.
    • The Coursera platform met the needs of the course in spite of being continuously under development while the course was live. Technical issues reported by the students and instructor were generally minor, of short duration and/or quickly resolved.
Patience, flexibility and resilience on the part of instructor, Coursera students, CIT staff, and Duke University Office of Information Technology media services staff were key elements in the success of this course.

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  • Beyond the MOOC Hype: Getting Serious about Online Learning

    Phil and I will be giving a webinar with the same title as this blog post for EDUCAUSE ELI on Monday, February 11th at 1 PM ET. It’s aimed at folks on campuses, especially Presidents, Provosts, and other academic decision-makers, who weren’t necessarily focused on online learning in the way that they are now that MOOCs have gotten their attention. We’re going to try to position MOOCs in the larger landscape of online learning and talk a little bit about how campuses can think about the various options in the context of their institutions’ respective missions and strategic goals. It’s a lot to try to accomplish in an hour, but I think we can give people a basic framework and a few important questions to ask themselves.

  • Why Big Data (Mostly) Can’t Help Improve Teaching

    Here’s a nifty video summary of a doctoral dissertation by Derek Muller that a client pointed out to me:

    The basic gist is that students have pre-conceived notions that are wrong, and it is very hard to dislodge those mistaken notions. If you show them a video with an accurate explanation, the students will say that the video was clear and helpful, but they will misremember it as confirming their (mistaken) preconceived notions. In short, they won’t learn. In contrast, if you show them a video that starts by directly stating and then refuting their misconception, they like the video less and say it is confusing, but they actually learn more. This is a really important pedagogical point to know whether you are giving traditional in-class lectures, writing curricular materials, or creating one of those oh-so-modern video lectures that all the cool kids are into these days.

    It’s also a good example of the kind of insight that big data is completely blind to. And it gives us good reason to be skeptical that taking large lecture courses online, turning them into REALLY large lecture courses (with nice videos), and expecting that new and more effective pedagogies will rise out of the data because, you know, science or something, is more of a hope (or a fantasy) than a plan to improve education.

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  • Further Evolution of MOOCs with Academic Partnerships and MOOC2Degree Launch

    One of the fastest growing educational delivery models over the past year is the school-as-a-service concept, where companies like Pearson, 2U, Academic Partnerships and Deltak provide the services needed for a traditional institution to create an online program at scale. As I have often pointed out, traditional institutions have a organizational designs and cultures that often prevent them from successfully creating self-sustaining online programs, which is the reason for the barrier in the landscape diagram. School-as-a-service model provides a bridge over that barrier.

    Of course, the model that has grown even faster are MOOCs. Yesterday Academic Partnerships launched a new concept called MOOC2Degree that attempts to combine these two models, thus giving working adults (the sweet spot of their market) a lower cost, easier method to get credits in an online program.

    AP Graphic 2

     

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  • Where xMOOCs and Adaptive Analytics Both Fail (For Now)

    No, this isn’t just an attempt to cram as many sexy keywords into one post title as possible. xMOOCs and adaptive analytics share an ambition: They both are at least partially motivated by a desire to teach at scale. With MOOCs, the goal is obvious. With adaptive analytics, less so, partly because there are multiple motivations and maybe because the desire for scale is not something that is polite to talk about due to a certain amount of discomfort with it. But the motivation is definitely there if you look closely, as I’ll get into in a bit.

    The problem is that both of these approaches, in their current incarnations, miss one absolutely critical element of the teaching process. As you can probably guess from all the qualifiers I am using in my language, I don’t think it’s an inherent or permanent failing. But I worry that it’s a failing due to a deep cultural blind spot that we have about what education is, and that it therefore will be challenging to address.

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  • 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, the more important impact from xMOOCs can be seen in terms of forcing higher education as a system or culture to no longer ignore online education as a self-contained side issue and instead evaluate the role of online education for all of higher education.

    Ignoring the Impact of Online Education

    For decades, if not centuries, the higher education system in the US has been holding on to a relatively stable status quo. Demand for postsecondary degrees constantly rises, the economic value of these degrees rises, the reputation of institutions remains high. This status quo has held despite two very uncomfortable underlying issues. One is that tuition and total student costs at a faster rate than inflation or even health care. The second is that US higher education as a system has not leveraged the remarkable gains from technology that almost every other industry has achieved.

    It’s true that there have been many innovations in higher education based on technology usage such as online software, but the system at large has been remarkably resilient and avoided any structural change. Yes, the vast majority of institutions have a centrally-supported LMS, but the pedagogical design of most courses has remained unchanged. Yes, many individual faculty have designed rich learning experiences within their courses, but their departments and colleges have typically resisted the uncomfortable discussion of whether these new pedagogical models should diffuse to the broader set of courses and programs. Yes, there have been online education innovations from for-profits and even public colleges such as Rio Salado and SNHU, but these organizations have remained self-contained and not directly affected the mainline non-profit educational model.

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