Free and accessible education for everyone, from prestigious universities all over the world. Is the massive open online course (MOOC) a democratic wonder of the world? The second article about the practice of online studying, online didactics and testing. In what way does the MOOC still rely (too) heavily on traditional education? And where lies the key to success?
In the first article I mainly talked about the rise of free online courses and my early experiences. This time I will talk about the practice and the didactics. I will conclude with tips for MOOC designers and future MOOC students.
Are global MOOCs a hype that peaks and then collapses? Despite the enthusiasm, there are also dissenting voices:
MOOCs in numbers: low returns?
A whopping enrollment of 160,000 students resulted from Stanford's first open course on artificial intelligence in the fall of 2011. This spurred the creation in 2012 of today's three largest providers: Coursera , Udacity and edX . Within a year, Coursera had 2.8 million users.
The Major Players in the MOOC Field (https://chronicle.com/article/The-Major ... OOC/138817)
The Major Players in the MOOC Field Source: https://chronicle.com/article/The-Major ... OOC/138817
The University of Amsterdam started Introduction to Communication Science , the first Dutch MOOC, on 20 February 2013. Of the 5400 registrants, 3400 actively participated in the course. After eight weeks, 717 took the exam. This meant a pass rate of (depending on what you take as a starting point) 13 to 20 percent.
That is still high compared to the average of around 8 percent. It is also one of the criticisms of free online education: the return is said to be too low. However, I think that is measuring with the wrong dimensions. It could well be that the percentage of participants who successfully complete the course is inversely proportional to a high enrollment. In absolute terms, these are still large numbers.
Completion rate per hundred registrants. Source: MOOC completion rates: the data
Completion rate per hundred registrants. Source: MOOC completion rates: the data – https://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
The design of the UvA online course is actually strongly based on the physical ghana mobile phone number list tudy model: a fixed start and end date, a period of eight weeks with weekly 'lectures'. That does not yet take into account the personal preference of the student, who may want to take half a year or accelerate when it suits him.
Because the backgrounds of the students varied greatly, the lessons were divided into short videos of three to five minutes. Some students preferred a continuous lecture of twenty minutes. They could watch all the videos in a weekly YouTube playlist . I myself found the individual clips ideal: portions that you can consume between dinner and the eight o'clock news, so to speak. That also makes learning flexible.
Online didactics: responding to learning styles
The lecturer Rutger de Graaf is pleasant to watch and listen to. But only a talking head on screen is static. Cartoons, photos and texts gave a touch and illustrated the history and theories of communication science. The lecture itself was full of functional examples, repetitions and references, I noticed. In between, the structure of the course was mentioned. Where did we start? What are we going to cover now? What are we going to talk about in the coming weeks?
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The video clips had English subtitles that you could turn on or off. In addition, there was a weekly transcript in pdf of the spoken text. So you could also absorb the theory textually, but that makes it a lot less lively.