Interesting article which asks how significant it is that only about 7% of those undertaking MOOCs complete them… or whether them taking part in the course without assignments is benefit enough:
According to her findings, which are based on local news articles, university documents, presentations and other information sources (including Times Higher Education), the average Mooc completion rate across the 29 courses was just 6.8 per cent.
Image Credit: StockfreshThe course with the highest rate of completion was Functional Programming Principles in Scala, from Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and offered on the US Mooc platform Coursera. According to Ms Jordan’s research, some 19.2 per cent of the 50,000 students who enrolled completed the course.
Read full article, or see what Martha Kanter, the US undersecretary of education had to say:
If the public good of Moocs is the power to make higher education more democratic, how can this group be assisted to participate, complete and get credit?
Or a comment from Alan Ryan, who compares US/UK institutions, and the need to prepare students for HE earlier:
Meanwhile, the US desperately needs to import The Open University, instead of discovering the hard way that massive open online courses, or Moocs, just don’t work without the sort of tutor-led small group backup that the OU has provided for almost half a century.
Digiexplorer (not guru), Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing @ Manchester Metropolitan University. Interested in digital literacy and digital culture in the third sector (especially faith). Author of 'Raising Children in a Digital Age', regularly checks hashtag #DigitalParenting.
