Recently a student came to me who seemed to be failing his first year and felt unfairly treated. “If I don’t pass here, I’ll take MOOCs. Do you know what MOOCs are? Then the school won’t get my tuition and I’ll be better off.” The above anecdote shows that MOOCs strongly appeal to the imagination.
A Massive Open Online Course is freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. There are currently three major players: Coursera , Udacity and Edx , each offering MOOCs. MOOCs are currently 'hot' in online education (PDF). But what could MOOCs actually mean for (Dutch) higher education?
Gartner, the renowned consultancy, maps out the most ukraine mobile phone number list important trends in education every year. According to them, MOOCs will reach their peak in two to five years. You can also see a tremendous growth in the number of MOOCs that are offered. The first ones were mainly about technical subjects (engineering, mathematics and science).
Now you see MOOCs emerging in other areas. Just look at Coursera, business and management courses . In its first 13 months since its inception, Coursera offered about 325 courses. Of which 30% were in the sciences, 28% in arts and humanities, 23% in information technology, 13% in business and 6% in mathematics. Udacity offered 26 courses. The largest MOOC is Udacity's CS101 with over 300,000 students.
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The background of the first MOOC
Peter Norvig explains in a Ted talk what the background of his online course was. Despite the fact that he would like to unleash a major educational revolution, it is striking that he simply applies 'old school' pedagogy to increase the learning effect. Such as fixed start and end times, so that students are all working on the same theory at the same time. Because you can't discuss with 10,000 students in a classroom, they also encouraged online forums, where students can help each other. After all, you can often learn a lot from your fellow students.
A drive also seems to be the analysis of big data . “We collect thousands of interactions per student per class and we can analyze them and learn from them, and experiment. And that’s where the real revolution comes from.”