I am currently doing a Coursera MOOC on Statistics. Great technology & learning platform, but as has been sugested, you do not have the real-time interactivity to clarify points or discuss issues. Part of the assessment is also peer-marking 5 other students. As such, what is marketed as a simple course on statistics becomes a labour intensive 'A' or nothing course (81% needed for any form of recognition) .... so I can see why many revert to passively watching the learning material but loose the motivation to 'complete'. Many people though (like myself) take these courses simply to improve their knowledge. If they get through all the lectures, answer the in-built questions to show they have 'attended' & paid attention to the material & have got what they need from the course, I would argue that they have actually completed the course & should achieve some form of recognition. Not having the time or inclination to sit tests that need an 'A' is perhaps not an appropriate measure to judge why people 'drop off' such courses. I think we should consider them (& their function) differently from how we consider students on traditional courses.

That said though- I think MOOCs are a huge initiative and contribute greatly to the vocational & societal aspects of learning provision that are sometimes neglected in this modern age :-)

Yes MOOC's are wonderful and Coursera is leading the way.

What have you taken? They have great stats and i like their polls/quizzes/feedback but the diy model of intense learning with an expert seems satisfying as well. Where do you think this leaves higher ed?

LORE is a nice option as well.

Yes, I thought the MOOC's will change Universities. I used Coursera and I also use iTune U, OCW and podcast frequently.

Yes I took a class from Udacity and the quality of the lecture was indeed exceptional. However MOOC's (whether xMOOC's (such as Udacity, Coursera, or EdX) or cMOOC's) can not replace interactive courses and real teacher to student interaction. They can either be an additive to a real course or a way if physical participation is nor possible. I agree that they have the power to change education. They can help people to get access to higher education never having this opportunity before. This wonderful idea however highly depends on the implementation of these courses. If they will end up as a new way for universities to maximize profit, turn over, and cache flow just labeled open not much will change. But if really open courses provide the possibility to get a degree in a self controlled learning environment then we are on the brink of something really interesting.

We all know that higher ed as we know it is based on the industrial model. As such they are money making (or at least spending) organizations. As the world moves to great content for less and less, if not free, does anyone know of an economic model that would sustain them? Our governments (at least in Europe) are not well placed to do it these days - and yet on a practical note most of us went into academia thinking it would easily sustain us.

Ideas or comments on this part of the MOOC etc context to higher ed?

I completed "Probabilistic Graphical Models", on coursera.

Aside from economic considerations, the MOOCs are a fantastic resource for anyone who wants/needs to learn.

Of course, for the teacher / institution, there is the problem of avoiding cheating.

I received certs from Coursera in: machine learning, model thinking and gamification.

thanks for sending on the article and I will pass your idea about taking writing from Coursera - many of the doctoral students who come to www.doctoralnet.com need help in that area and my friend who runs a site for proof reading says 50% of his business is from students who are writing in a second language - your idea to use MOOCs as backup is great.

Open access to knowledge is an amazing development that is transforming notions of universities as ivory towers. It certainly challenges conceptions of what higher education is and could be. As I work in an environment that is very disadvantaged in many ways, I welcome MOOCs, in theory, as progress towards the aspiration that "the doors of learning shall be open to all". In practice, however, many of those who have been excluded from higher education in the past continue to be excluded from these innovations due to lack of financial resources, access to appropriate technologies, or lack of epistemological access.

I know 10 colleagues that have registered at some Mooc. In 9 cases, they didn't arrive to the end. And the 10th... well, the Mooc was stopped by editors.

We know that open universities have a much higher subscription and a higher failure rate than brick-and-mortar universities. By extension, we should not be surprised that MOOCs have a phenomenal drop-out rate (caused minimal qualifications, commitment, perseverance, motivation to complete, and maximal distractions ...)

My son-in-law's brother 'attended' a coursera on Python. He was annoyed that he had to watch a full lecture, without being able to skim through course notes. He was annoyed that he was asked a trivial question on something from the video, that had nothing to do with the course, to prove that he watched the video. Otherwise, his experience was positive, and he did learn about the programming language.

The MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) are a new generation of tools that aim to go beyond the eBook to create personalized learning experiences for each student using artificial intelligence techniques. As part of the model change, instead of receiving theoretical lessons in class and go home exercises, students study the theory previously on their own and then go to class uestions, concepts, and practice setting with the teacher. The MOOC promise to be really a new strategy to support knowledge management.

I have started several, but not finished because of having to prioritize my doctoral classes, and work.

Tried a MOOC on venture-lab.org last year and I follow Udacity, edX and Coursera passively each week and I suggest appropriate courses to undergrad engineering students. MOOCs are just another way to learn something if there is interest. However they are neither going to be the only way forward nor they will disappear.

I am still waiting for MOOC 2.0 or 9.0 (MOOC itself is OCW 2.0 if you count) that stops teaching and starts solving a real problem in the world and allow students to go back to an OCW to learn on their own. MOOP anyone - Massive Open Online Project? And we already have those for decades in FLOSS - Free/Libre/Open Source Software.

Anyone wants to design pavements/footpaths/ road shoulders? No joke. Read somewhere that the sophistication of an advanced country shows in its footpaths. Engineering design, aesthetics, property rights etc. need to be considered if you really want to solve this problem. Or you can just mow over and pour some concrete. Every street on Earth needs one. Why do we just ignore and move on and talk about colonizing the Mars?

We have participated in, and researched, several MOOCs.

But to answer your question, we think it is necessary to take one step back, and first find a way to describe what's happening in MOOCs.

To do this, we have created a 3D footprint of emergent learning, and applied it to teaching and learning across a wide range of educational sectors. It requires quite a bit of thinking, and its work in progress - your contribution would be welcome.

See: http://footprints-of-emergence.wikispaces.com/

I think in the future, it will be part of the course for graduation at least in some universities. It is a techonology once again and globulization all over the world. As well as science is rapidly devoped and hardly to follow without technology (digital world). The problem is always there is a price to pay such as time to follow and cost. Anyway we can not avoided.

I have completed two courses one on Udacity (or rather the first AI course that preceded the setup of Udacity) and one on modern history on Coursera. The quality of the lecturers was vey high. I have started two others and partially completed them before stopping, one because it wasn't meeting my specific interest in it (an IT course)and the other because I was only interested in a part of the course (what I did was very useful and exactly what I wanted) on Social Network Analysis. I am beginning another on Genetics that has started very well. From the discussion groups I get the impression that some students who are doing the courses are lecturers from other institutions and are setting parts of the courses for their own students, probably individual video segments. Some other feedback in discussions shows that some academics are using the courses to broaden their knowledge. This means the discussion forums run at several different levels (one course had an eager 14 year old schoolboy at one extreme and an 80 year old retired professor from a different discipline at the other).The quality of the output (video, notes, links to sources) are very good. One area that is evolving rapidly seems to be testing and marking which is under continuous comment by both students and professors. This is an aspect where testing is much easier for technical subjects than the humanities. Some Coursera participants are also beginning to offer more formal qualifications per course tied to the originating institution in exchange for money. I have an interest in e-learning systems and in some specific inter-disciplinary research so my experience covers more than one aspect. Coursera is now offering courses in a variety of languages which offers a quite different experience possibility for multi-linguists.

There was an interesting article in The New York Times a few days ago in which the journalist took a number of courses from the main providers of these MOOCs and his conclusion was that they provide a service but not a real education. I agree for the following reasons; firstly an university education is more than just the accumulation of facts and secondly the teachers becomes little more than a resource similar to a textbook but less than a Google search. As educators do we want to be a archive, stored on a computer or do we want to interact with the students as people to develop their skills so that they can further the knowledge of our particular subject area. Online courses are of particular interest to me but I want to improve the interaction between the participants instead of dismissing it.

The link for the article is http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/grading-the-mooc-university.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130421&_r=0

I am currently doing a Coursera MOOC on Statistics. Great technology & learning platform, but as has been sugested, you do not have the real-time interactivity to clarify points or discuss issues. Part of the assessment is also peer-marking 5 other students. As such, what is marketed as a simple course on statistics becomes a labour intensive 'A' or nothing course (81% needed for any form of recognition) .... so I can see why many revert to passively watching the learning material but loose the motivation to 'complete'. Many people though (like myself) take these courses simply to improve their knowledge. If they get through all the lectures, answer the in-built questions to show they have 'attended' & paid attention to the material & have got what they need from the course, I would argue that they have actually completed the course & should achieve some form of recognition. Not having the time or inclination to sit tests that need an 'A' is perhaps not an appropriate measure to judge why people 'drop off' such courses. I think we should consider them (& their function) differently from how we consider students on traditional courses.

That said though- I think MOOCs are a huge initiative and contribute greatly to the vocational & societal aspects of learning provision that are sometimes neglected in this modern age :-)

The future of MOOCs depends on the design - if they can be made more interactive they may thrive. Assessment for credit is the key sticking point. Timely and substantive feedback is what helps student learn and without this many will continue to drop out. Some have suggested that MOOCs will be the future of public higher ed as only the wealthy will be able to continue to afford the luxury of face to face courses. I hope this is not the case. I suggest reading "Teaching Naked" by J. Bowen for a more complex answer to this question.

In the EU-funded research project TEL-map we have written a bit of an analysis piece here: http://learningfrontiers.eu/?q=content/massive-open-online-course

We also ran a Delphi survey in TEL-map on MOOCs. The results were in parts very surprising: For example, 46% of the experts surveyed stated that MOOCs will never become a major learning delivery model and only 19% saw this possibility in 5-10 years or less. We also found that the "use of personal data generated through MOOCs needs more regulation." (86% highly desirable, 80% considered it as feasible).

In the report you find much more on that (including a discussion of these results).

Christian Voigt, who was leading on this piece, seems not to have published the according report yet - but you can ask him for a copy of the Annex to deliverable d4.2b, titled "Report on socio-economic developments most relevant to emerging new Learning paradigms (Annex: Foresight on innovative Learning Practices)".

Christian can be contacted via: https://www.zsi.at/users/156

The report is surely to be published very soon, project-internally it was released in a final reviewed from on May, 5th, 2013.

From a couple points of view... My husband uses them from various places: MIT, Stanford, Coursera, and Khan Academy. He's retired from high-tech, but has been building a robot and writing software that controls it. When we went through engineering back in the 1970s, linear algebra was not taught. Matrices are well matched to computers so, he went through several courses on that, as well as on robotics systems and such. Thus, it fills in at a high technical level, his "hobby."

Also, I teach for University of Phoenix Online, math classes, 11 years now. UoPhx points students to the Khan Academy video as supportive material. In the classes I facilitate, I have a weekly discussion questions around videos that support these adult learners. They mostly love the video as helpful adjunct material.

last, exactly when these MOOCs gain status as a degree granting or course credit granting institution from the accrediting boards will be a ways away I think..

Over the last few months I have enrolled myself for a few MOOCs offered by the three biggest providers (COURSERA, UDACITY and EdX) but couldn't quite complete any of them. The reasons for enrollment included interest in technology assisted learning as a teaching/learning environment and courses offered on some highly unconventional topics. Couldn't stay on schedule because of the inherent problem of such courses that lack of interaction kills motivation. However, I did scroll through most of the content and found it of very high quality that provides good reading.

Besides all this, I do believe that the ongoing experimentation with technology and its adoption for creation of effective teaching/learning environment will one day discover truly interactive yet virtual classrooms.

I was overwhelmed by trying to review the responses of the other 400+ participants in the response threads in order to decide with whom to interact. It was demotivating to see some who were way way ahead, with responses that seemed impossible to have been made by one person, and also to stumble through responses that were struggling with stuff that I was also stumbling over. Navigation was exhausting. By the time I finished sampling the huge array of content delivery platforms (imovies, download documents, links to webpages, vodcasts and podcasts, and finally quizzes), I just gave up. Too rich for my blood!

I have completed two courses on Coursera, one in statistics and the other in machine learning. The quality of the lecturers and the general structure was very good.

The fact that there is not interaction with the professors is a disadvantage...

Moreover,although you may get "help" from the forums, you should spent a lot of time to go through the related conversations and debates ...Some times the posts have false ideas

I'm a teacher with interest in e-learning and I find Moocs very interesting experiment.

The technology which support Moocs ( The course stucture, the submition and the immediate grading of the assignments, the quality of the video etc) is impressive.

For me, Moocs are helpfull for people who want to learn for themself and they wouldn't be able to do this due to time and financial restrictions. Finally I think that it would be very challenging for young students (after secondary school) to manage to get a "degree" studying only through Moocs.

I didn't really like online courses when I was completing my degrees and probably never will like them much. That said, I too started a statistics course in Coursera to revisit and brush up on my knowledge. Part of the way through I realized I needed to first brush up on my Algebra. My last math course was in 1978. I've forgotten a lot! The stats course is very good to the point I completed, but the Algebra course seems to have a problem. After reviewing many lectures, I found that the corresponding tests were not testing the lecture materials. So I stalled out and will seek one-on-one tutoring instead. So, I'll probably not return to the Coursera Algebra course and am not too motivated to return to the stats course either.

However, I took an online certification series from the University of Notre Dame which consisted of video lectures, reading materials, online tests, and weekly professor-initiated, live chats via Skype. I absolutely loved it. The weekly live chats were wonderful and if I had questions or needed clarification I could get that in a "live" setting. The lectures were also very good, in a format that I could relate to. I believe it was the live chats that made the difference. So, for me, MOOCs will probably never be very appealing. I need the live interaction, even if it's only once a week, online, or by phone.

I took three courses in Chemistry from saylor.org in order to augment my knowledge and capacitate myself in dealing with Online courses being regarded as the "future of learning". Excited at first, read ebooks and watch videos, but later on, i lost the zest. Well, the quality of content of e-materials are very good. I only have a problem with motivation and time. I think the reason why most people took MOOC courses is basically a personal challenge. They want to know if they can hurdle and still fit to accomplish the challenge. But because there is no one who bothers or care to know about the what now? question, we just fade and wave as if its just okay.

I got an experience similar to Elmer with a programming course for mobile phones. The course had a good material, but I had lack of time and motivation to complete the course.

Think there is still much to explore in this area (MOOCs), especially as regards the adaptation of these courses according to the user (student).

I have taken a couple of MOOCs successfully. Although we were about 50.000 students the profesor Comer (from Duke University) was able to organize a peer review procedure that really worked, so everybody got enough feedback and motivation.

Now I´m designing a MOOC my self aiming to help High School Students to undestand our crazy world and design successfully their life proyect and career path. I have big hopes for it.

I took some courses at Coursera, using MOOC recently. I like it but I don't think it's to get degrees for everybody.... it's a way to spread education among people who should not have access to those courses in other way for many different reasons.

It's not the first time I am involved with E-learning, I completed my first course by TV programs in entrepreneurship in early 90's.

In Brazil, during many years, several people could learn technical professions only using radio or regular mail service. It's the predecessor of MOOC... smile

My second course "online" was a massive course as well, many of the other students I never had any contact neither trough the internet.

And I had another experience where I got an specialization post graduate title, but it was a mix of the actual version of MOOC and few live meetings among professors and students. Including the end presentation like an "exam" of our monograph.

There are other platforms as Moodle, for example... just bad explored, but as good as MOOC.

You will never reach each students, some people has no profile to study alone, which requires tons of motivation and also discipline to keep you compromised all the time.

The last report I read about shows that only about 30% of the students goes until the end... and it doesn't mean that this 30% has great scores... just that they finished.

So I don't think it will substitute completely traditional forms of education but surely is a way to spread knowledge and reduce inequity to access of good information.

I'm sure MOOCs are not "just a blip on a screen". The possibility to participate in all kinds of different courses from universities and colleges all over the world using today's technology is a huge opportunity, imho. You don't "just" watch videos, you can participate in discussions, exchange info and knowledge with other participants, usually you really have to learn the subject matter in order to pass the tests and you can get a certificate, which might be motivating for some. In the edX-course I completed, some people arranged "real world" meetings in their areas to discuss exercises etc..

I completed the edX-course "Introduction to Computer Science and Programming" and learnt a great deal. I benefited most from the interaction with others in the forums etc.. And the opportunity to watch video lectures of Computer Science legends such as John Guttag or Eric Grimson (both MIT) is great, because you usually have to go to Cambridge MA to see them "live".

The question is very interesting. But, I think that this depend of the person. We all have a specific perspective when do we a experience in this topic (teaching/learning). I have completed two courses MOOC. One in futurelearning and other in coursera. But, I'm not sure if this is useful for think the future of MOOC. Firstly, all this is a differente thing, then we need think from different ways. The discussión about the education and technology disruptive is good in this case. For example, in this research network, there are 13 forums about this topic and we don't know how linked us between all. This last, have to do with the way how we were educated. The new generations come with others paradigms.

Regards

I agree with the last post. 

I am used to take MOOC and use online tools generally, but my concern goes forward.

Nowadays you can create online classes into the Khan Academy or Canvas for example... and you just need to send the link ... none is controlling the quality of what is going to be offered in many cases, the veracity and the author. 

And this is just because MOOC become a "trend" in education, there are no regulation and no control. In this case I think there is a bad side in a very useful and powerful tool.