Image: Alan Levine

Image: Giulia Forsythe

“The Year Of The MOOC” “Higher Education: the MOOC is our mp3” “Two decades to take out the 'trash', Mooc- style” “The Big Idea That Can Revolutionize Higher Education: 'MOOC‘” “How MOOCs will wipe thousands off the value of YOUR family home” Yes! It’s the MOOCopalypse!

Take one traditional online learning course add robo-marking hyped as “artificial intelligence”... peer marking (poorly implemented)... re-invent the VLE wheel (again!)... stir in some “education is broken” hype... $$$ venture capital... And you’ve just been MOOCed MOOC – the taste of a new generation

Q1: What is a MOOC? A: A course delivered online using openly-licensed materials to a large cohort? B: Any free-to-enrol online course? C: Pretty much anything to do with online learning? D: All of the above.

Q2: Who invented the MOOC and when? A: Dave Cormier and Stephen Downes, as a part of their mid 00s theories of connectivism? B: Sebastian Thrun, with his 2011 experience in opening a Stamford AI course? C: Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy in D: No-one, it was discovered – not invented.

“diyU” “education is broken” large scale replacement of current structures. start-ups disruptive “RLO” techno-deterministic automation standardisation new tools, platforms “commons” open web freedom licences, sharing. using existing tools.

“And then one day you find Ten years have got behind you No one told you when to run You missed the starting gun...” Dark Side of the MOOC

Q3: According to researcher Katy Jordan, what is the average size of a MOOC enrollment and how many students would be expected to complete the course? A: Enrolment of c50,000, less than 10% complete the course B: Enrolment of c150,000, around 60% complete the course C: Enrolment of c2,000,000, around 30% complete the course D: Incomplete data exists, impossible to say with any confidence.

“I quit three weeks into the course. The videos were distracting. I felt disconnected from the professor, as if the face I saw on-screen was a detached third party serving up neatly packaged bits of information for massive consumption. It felt sterile.” Rachelle DeJong, MOOC student “155,000 students registered for the course when it opened in February, but only 23,000 earned a single point on the first problem set, and 9,300 passed the midterm. When the course ended, 8,200 students took the final. Just over 7,000 earned a passing grade and the option of receiving an informal certificate from edX.” Data from first EdX course education-online-business-model-open-and-non-profit/ hy_i_dropped_ou.html

Edinburgh and Coursera "Populating the platform itself was quite time-consuming, but we thought that once it was up and running, it would kind of run itself. That's the impression we got from Coursera - just wind it up and watch it go. However, we found that we were spending a lot of time monitoring the course while it was going.“ (Jeremy Knox, instructor, Edinburgh/Coursera) "With this kind of scale there is absolutely no way you can please everyone, so I think you just have to offer a Mooc that you are happy with in terms of content and design, have a clear sense of what you're trying to achieve with it, and stick to your guns"(Sian Bayne, Instructor, Edinburgh/Coursera) 42,000 enrolments on #edcmooc – 17,000 participants – 2,000 completions " As with all online courses, the costs are front-loaded but even more so for MOOCs of this type, where the delivery cost (especially teaching) is low. We will spend effort and money on all our courses to get them to the right quality."(Jeff Hayward, Developerr, Edinburgh/Coursera)

Q4: What are MOOC students like? A: Mostly from disadvantaged backgrounds with no previous access to HE? B: Very similar demographically to current undergrad students? C: Well-off, western, and mostly educated to degree level or above? D: Impossible to classify – diverse and representative of the global reach of MOOCs.

“Report on survey responses from 2,350 students who enrolled in a Massive Online Open Class (MOOC) titled “Computational Investing, Part I” via coursera.org in Fall The responses represent 41% of the students who completed the course and 2.6% of those who initially enrolled but did not complete it.” /mooc-student-demographics/

Q5: Your Vice-Chancellor or Principal decides to offer a MOOC. What platform options are available? A: Coursera B: Udacity C: FutureLearn D: Blackboard, and similar commercial offerings.

“revolutionising conventional models of formal education.” “a transformational new partnership in online education.” “Higher education is broken with increasingly higher costs for both students and our society at large.” "Higher education is ripe for innovation: it is too expensive and limited to a few" “BlackBoard CourseSites: Move your courses online free” “Pearson OpenClass: Break through to learning at scale” “Instructure Canvas: Open online learning, as defined by you”

Image: David Kernohan

Image: Vivien Rolfe

Some further reading JISC CETIS: MOOCs and Open Education JISC: infokit on MOOCs History of open education (DK & Amber Thomas)