While nature was dumping mounds of snow on the region (albeit less than promised), Harvard and MIT decided to release a comparable amount of data to the public that provides some important insight that can inform the next round of discussions surrounding MOOCs, discussions that promise to go beyond the inflated expectations that began 2013 […]
Define MOOC
The author of this book on crowdsourcing took a bold move in trying to define the term in a way that would make it clear when one entity (like the t-shirt company Threadless) should be considered an example of the phenomenon while another (like Wikipedia) should not. And since I’m writing a title for the […]
An Answer to the Question of MOOC attrition rates?
Data relating to MOOC activity has been trickling out for quite some time. For instance, the University of Edinburgh released this 42-page report detailing their analysis of statistics related to six courses they released via Coursera in 2013. And data related to edX’s popular Circuits and Electronics course has been making the rounds for quite […]
Measuring MOOCs – Human vs. Data
I had no sooner finished drafting a section of my senior thesis which hails Canada’s contributions to the massive learning phenom than a note arrived from George Veletsianos, Canada Research Chair at the Royal Roads University School of Education and Technology. In it, Professor Veletsianos pointed me towards an e-book he and his students put […]
Stephen Downes
Anyone who has played this side of the street for even a little while will have run into Stephen Downes, one of the earliest participants in something that can (and was) called a MOOC and tireless champion for the vision of connectivist learning that makes up the “c” in “cMOOC” (which contrasts with the xMOOCs […]