What is a MOOC?
Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, are online courses designed to be scalable. In other words, the course infrastructure of a MOOC is designed so as to provide the same support to 100 students as it would to 100,000. MOOCs are often made available free of charge, making them an attractive option to learners seeking to further their education. Furthermore, MOOCs provide learners with the opportunity to take courses with professors from prominent institutions, including Harvard and Duke.
Where do MOOCs come from?
Since the early days of the Internet, attempts have been made to use the technology to deliver education solutions to the public. However, almost all MOOCs differentiate themselves from platforms such as the University of Phoenix by providing the course materials and instruction at no cost to the user. In other words, the educational opportunity provided by a MOOC is both free and open to the public.
The first MOOC, as coined by Dave Cormier, was based upon the connectivist theory of learning. Connectivism, which has received a great deal of criticism since being revealed to the public in 2005, prioritizes learning within groups as opposed to individuals. Despite the adoption of the term, connectivist advocate Stephen Downes would later argue the most well-known MOOCs have little in common with connectivist courses.
The MOOC “moment” occurred in 2012, with the inception of course providers Coursera, Udacity, and edX. Along with the backing of prominent universities and investors, including The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, MOOCs have also received a significant amount of media attention from outlets such as The Atlantic, Forbes and The Guardian.
How do MOOCs work?
MOOCs provide a number of advantages to both instructors and students, including the opportunity for instructors to record, and students to complete, course materials at a time of their choosing. While MOOCs do include assignment deadlines, there is not a set time when students and instructors must congregate together. Furthermore, since MOOCs exclusively occur in online spaces, a learner in Australia, for example, could take a course with a professor in Massachusetts.
Course Materials
As an online course, materials are delivered to students in the form of digital documents and videos. Students enrolled in the courses will have access to assignment sheets and weekly readings. Professors will often video record their lectures with a web camera, offering a one-on-one experience that more closely resembles a Skype video call than a lecture hall.
Assessment
To maintain the course’s scalability, instructors do not grade each individual assignment by hand. Instead, assessment often consists of computer-graded multiple choice quizzes or, for writing-intensive courses, peer reviewing. In order to receive a “passing” grade on a MOOC, students will have to score within a specific range, such as 85% or above.
Challenges
Learners enrolled in MOOCs must be extremely self-motivated and disciplined so as to complete their courses. Since they are generally not required to pay for their courses and will not be receiving credit for completion, MOOCs do not often provide the sense of urgency one might receive in a traditional university setting. As a result, less than 10% of students who enroll in a particular course will complete the assigned materials and pass the class.
What are the major MOOC providers?
Currently, the major MOOC providers include Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn among others. Each provider offers a variety of courses affiliated with prominent universities around the world. Like the MOOC phenomenon itself, most of these organizations were founded or came into prominence during the 2012 calendar year.
Coursera, a for-profit MOOC provider, was founded by Stanford University computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. The platform, which offers courses in twelve different languages, is affiliated with 108 partner universities. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the research of five writing courses on the Coursera platform during the 2013 calendar year.
Finding for-profit MOOC providers to be rather disagreeable, Harvard and MIT founded edX to compete with Coursera and Udacity. EdX’s partners also include Stanford and Google, and its platform offers science, humanities, and technology courses. More than 2.5 million users have joined edX since it’s inception.
Although Udacity once tried to compete with Coursera and edX, the for-profit company changed its focus to offering vocational courses at the end of 2013. The company’s offerings mostly consist of tech-oriented courses and the company has partnered with the Georgia Institute of Technology to offer a Master’s degree in Computer Science.
Owned by the Open University, FutureLearn is a nonprofit United Kingdom-based organization with both university and non-university partners. Unlike Udacity, FutureLearn offers a diverse range of MOOC courses in both the humanities and the sciences. FutureLearn’s partners include the British Museum and the British Library.
How can you take advantage of MOOCs?
One of the major advantages of the MOOC is its ability to make formerly exclusive education opportunities available to the public. Through edX, for example, a learner can take courses taught by tenured professors at Stanford University, Harvard, and MIT. While someone cannot earn a degree from an Ivy League school by taking MOOC courses, they can watch lectures and study materials provided by their professors.
While the majority of MOOCs just offer a certificate of completion, companies such as Coursera have begun to offer for-credit courses to the public. Students who wish to take required mathematics and science courses, such as “Calculus: Single Variable” through the University of Pennsylvania and the “Introduction to Genetics and Evolution” from Duke University, can do so for only a $60 to $90 cost for exam proctoring.
Finally, Georgia Tech, in conjunction with Udacity, has even begun to offer a Master’s degree in Computer Sciences through the MOOC platform. The program was met with a high demand, accepting 401 students out of 2,359 applicants. The new program demonstrates the MOOC platform’s capacity to limit higher education costs, as the total cost of the program comes out to $6,600.
Whether you’re interested in self-improvement, course credit, or even a degree program with a prominent university, MOOCs serve as a low-cost education opportunity if you’re seeking to further their education. If you’re interested in acquiring new skills or expanding your intellectual background, you should certainly explore the opportunities provided by this platform. As MOOC providers continue to innovate, it may soon be possible for you to receive his or her education exclusively through the platform.