scholarly journals Initial trends in enrolment and completion of massive open online courses

Author(s):  
Katy Jordan

<p>The past two years have seen rapid development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) with the rise of a number of MOOC platforms. The scale of enrolment and participation in the earliest mainstream MOOC courses has garnered a good deal of media attention. However, data about how the enrolment and completion figures have changed since the early courses is not consistently released. This paper seeks to draw together the data that has found its way into the public domain in order to explore factors affecting enrolment and completion. The average MOOC course is found to enroll around 43,000 students, 6.5% of whom complete the course. Enrolment numbers are decreasing over time and are positively correlated with course length. Completion rates are consistent across time, university rank, and total enrolment, but negatively correlated with course length. This study provides a more detailed view of trends in enrolment and completion than was available previously, and a more accurate view of how the MOOC field is developing.</p>

Author(s):  
Katy Jordan

<p>This analysis is based upon enrolment and completion data collected for a total of 221 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). It extends previously reported work (Jordan, 2014) with an expanded dataset; the original work is extended to include a multiple regression analysis of factors that affect completion rates and analysis of attrition rates during courses. Completion rates (defined as the percentage of enrolled students who completed the course) vary from 0.7% to 52.1%, with a median value of 12.6%. Since their inception, enrolments on MOOCs have fallen while completion rates have increased. Completion rates vary significantly according to course length (longer courses having lower completion rates), start date (more recent courses having higher percentage completion) and assessment type (courses using auto grading only having higher completion rates). For a sub-sample of courses where rates of active use and assessment submission across the course are available, the first and second weeks appear to be critical in achieving student engagement, after which the proportion of active students and those submitting assessments levels out, with less than 3% difference between them.</p>


Author(s):  
Enrique Mu

Until recently, there was no doubt about what constituted a university education and how it was carried out. Suddenly, the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, and in a few weeks, not only education, but the entire world changed. In the new normal, post-pandemic world, it is possible that teaching face-to-face courses will be the exception, not the rule, in the U.S. and the Latin American and Caribbean regions. Furthermore, this virtual instruction will possibly be at massive levels with tens or hundreds of thousands of students at a time, modeled after massive open online courses (MOOCs).


2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Schütte ◽  
Sophie-Hélène Goulet-Ebongue ◽  
Khamsa Habouchi

Abstract Technological advances during the last decade have provided novel opportunities for development of health and medical education. Education of health care professionals by massive open online courses (MOOCs) has been suggested in order to improve care and treatment of patients and the health literacy of the public. This article discusses the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of MOOCs in health and medical education by taking a special focus on low and middle-income countries.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanya Liu ◽  
Cheng Ni ◽  
Zhi Liu ◽  
Xian Peng ◽  
Hercy N.H. Cheng

Nowadays, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) has obtained a rapid development and drawn much attention from the areas of learning analytics and artificial intelligence. There are lots of unstructured data being generated in online reviews area. The learning behavioral data become more and more diverse, and they prompt the emergence of big data in education. To mine useful information from these data, we need to use educational data mining and learning analysis technique to study the learning feelings and discussed topics among learners. This paper aims to mine and analyze topic information hidden in the unstructured reviews data in MOOC, a novel author topic model based on an unsupervised learning idea is proposed to extract learning topics for the each learner. According to the experimental results, we will analyze and focuses of interests of learners, which facilitates further personalized course recommendation and improve the quality of online courses.


Author(s):  
Marina Lepp ◽  
Tauno Palts ◽  
Piret Luik ◽  
Kaspar Papli ◽  
Reelika Suviste ◽  
...  

Learning programming has become more and more popular and organizing introductory massive open online courses (MOOCs) on programming can be one way to bring this education to the masses. While programming MOOCs usually use automated assessment to give feedback on the submitted code, the lack of understanding of certain aspects of the tasks and feedback given by the automated assessment system can be one persistent problem for many participants. This paper introduces troubleshooters, which are help systems, structured like decision trees, for giving hints and examples of certain aspects of the course tasks. The goal of this paper is to give an overview of usability (benefits and dangers) of, and the participants’ feedback on, using troubleshooters. Troubleshooters have been used from the year 2016 in two different programming MOOCs for adults in Estonia. These MOOCs are characterized by high completion rates (50–70%), which is unusual for MOOCs. Data is gathered from the learning analytics integrated into the troubleshooters’ environment, letters from the participants, questionnaires, and tasks conducted through the courses. As it was not compulsory to use troubleshooters, the results indicate that only 19.8% of the users did not use troubleshooters at all and 10% of the participants did not find troubleshooters helpful at all. The main difference that appeared is that the number of questions asked from the organizers about the programming tasks during the courses via helpdesk declined about 29%.


Author(s):  
Khadija Naji ◽  
Abdelali Ibriz ◽  
Youssef Mourdi

The adoption of various forms of distance education, particularly MOOCs (an acronym for Massive Open Online Courses), by universities worldwide has continuously gained momentum over the past decade. This is due not only to the importance of maintaining a parallel educational model alongside face-to-face courses in order to complete students’ training, but also in response to the limits of academic infrastructure faced with an increasingly large mass of learners, typically in emerging countries. Universities view MOOCs as a remedy to this dilemma—one which promises reasonable development costs—especially taking into account the ubiquity of the internet and digital communication tools. In a country such as Morocco, whose university capacity has been stretched to 186%, the quest to dematerialize lectures can support universities in producing well-rounded professional profiles as well as improving institutional and academic services overall. In this paper, we present the feedback from Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University concerning its first scientific MOOC, launched within the framework of the MarocUniversitéNumérique (Morocco Digital University) or MUN project in collaboration with the France UniversitéNumérique (France Digital University) or FUN platform. The objectives of this paper are threefold: to assess the possibility of adopting further MOOCs in a Moroccan setting, to seek insight on the profiles of learners who have completed MOOCs and to draw lessons in order to improve future experiences.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-94
Author(s):  
Priyanka Bhaskar ◽  
◽  
Amit Joshi ◽  
Padmalosani Dayalan ◽  
◽  
...  

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has the potential to eradicate the digital divide and endorse education globally among the learners in the education industry. Through MOOCs platforms, teachers can upgrade their knowledge skills and abilities in their respective fields. The present study aims to identify the inhibiting factors underlying the adoption of MOOCs by teachers employed in higher education institutions. The research has employed an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of qualitative research methodology. In this research, teachers from the identified Universities of Uttarakhand, India are selected as the respondent to investigate the factors affecting the adoption of MOOCs. Findings reveal that technological barriers, financial barriers, and lack of awareness act as inhibiting factors in adopting MOOCs by teachers of HEI. This study also contributes to the literature by assessing the factors influencing teachers’ intention to adopt Massive Open Online Courses for learning. Through this paper, the three stakeholders of MOOCs, that is teachers, HEI and MOOC provider are suggested measures that will enhance the support and acceptability of the online courses.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Harris ◽  
William Heikoop ◽  
Allison Van Beek ◽  
James S. Wallace

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allow anyone in the public to learn from professors at universities across the world. An internet connection is the only requirement to participate in a MOOC. In engineering, the majority of MOOCs are targeted at self-learners, and consequently most courses are based on introductory undergraduate courses. The University of Toronto offered its first advanced engineering MOOC entitled, “Wind, Waves & Tides” based on a mixed fourth-year undergraduate and graduate level course. A total of 11,723 students registered in the course, and 617 students completed the course in its entirety. The following paper describes the experience of teaching a niche interest MOOC and the lessons learned throughout the endeavour.


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