MOOCS Recent news and research clues

We had a very entertaining webinar with Curt Bonk (The man in the pink suit!) about the history of MOOCS and the current situations. He started by talking about MORCs (His own invention to describe Massive Open Radio Courses.) which first took place back in 1933 with the University of Wisconsin teaching people about Agriculture and followed later with Home Economics and Typing (What a mix!) He explained that this was the forerunner of all the different types of MOOCs that we have today.

People take MOOCs today to learn new things, to refresh their memory and to update skills that they need in work and in life. He showed us a recent graph showing the explosion in the number of MOOCs just over the past 4 years from the very first MOOCs in 2011 to nearly 4000 today. This is no doubt to the rapidly increasing popularity of organisations like Coursera, Futurelearn and others.

We then looked at overviews of several chapters of his new book.

These included sections on how to open up learning for more people and the ways that some MOOCs are exclusive in that you need to be a member of an organisation or reside in a particular region to take them. Some countries are just starting up! He looked at the progression from creating Learning Objects to Open Courseware, Open Texbooks and finally to MOOCs specifically referring to MERLOT.

We then looked at the growth of MOOCs in different countries including South Africa and Australia before moving on to evaluating different MOOCs including AMP which is a tool for characterising the pedagogical approaches of MOOCs and saw that there do seem to be a lot of similarities between MOOCs.

We then looked at some different MOOCs and suggested we look at NovoED (to be done!) He also talked about MOOC Central which is a listing of all available MOOCs. After that we moved on to MOOCs being used to educate people in developing countries and hopefully enable them to escape poverty.

Curt then looked at the ways that learning on MOOCs can be validated so that it can be used in the real world, he talked about nanodegrees and microdegrees. After that we looked at the dropout rate for MOOCs and saw that the dropout rate seems to be about 50% in the first 2 weeks. Possibly because people don't realise the commitment that is required, sometimes because the course may not be what he expected.

After that he showed us an interesting map.

This shows a median age of 28 for MOOC participants. The darker green shows younger participants and the lighter green is older participants. One point that I found particularly interesting is the fact that participants over the age of 35 seem to be virtually non existent in this representation. It would be interesting to find out why and if this is a possible growth market for the future.

Curt then talked about a number of research topics including how people use the knowledge they gain from MOOCs, the translation of various courses into different languages to reduce exclusion and geopolitical issues where governments block access to MOOCs for various reasons.

This was a very thorough and enlightening review of MOOCs in general in the world today. Thank you Curt.