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Stop Asking About Completion Rates: Better Questions to Ask About MOOCs in 2019

Edsurge

As an instructional designer who has been building MOOCs for the past five years, I’ve been asked this question more times than I count. MOOCs have been called abysmal , disappointing failures. The average completion rate for MOOCs (including the ones I design) hovers between 5-15 percent. This skepticism is not unwarranted.

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Can We Design Online Learning Platforms That Feel More Intimate Than Massive?

Edsurge

Unfortunately, most massive open online course (MOOC) platforms still feel like drafty lecture halls instead of intimate seminar rooms. I think we’ve seen this reemergence—unintentionally—in the form of MOOCs. I typically build MOOCs, but this spring, I designed an online program for a cohort of 16 nonprofit leaders.

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Today’s Awkward Zoom Classes Could Bring a New Era of Higher Education

Edsurge

In fact, if we pull back from the immediate horrors of this moment, the move to online learning has actually been underway since around 2010, when universities and private entrepreneurs first began to experiment with Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Small-scale seminars can be intimate and powerful.

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Implementing education technology by pursuing technology education: Professional Development ideas for educators

Neo LMS

As members, educators can take part in events, forums, seminars, training and more. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are also excellent resources, offering free classes from world-renowned universities. Join a professional organization. As such, they might need to rely on technology to further their education. Take a degree course.

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Live Online Video Classes Are ‘The New Face-to-Face.’ So How Many Students Can They Handle at a Time?

Edsurge

The online university advertises its video-based online courses as active-learning seminars, so these class sizes are modeled after their counterparts at many traditional face-to-face colleges. Early MOOC experiments had more than 100,000 students per course. This is not an operation where one person does it. It takes a team."

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More humanities seminars online, and they’re not MOOCs

Bryan Alexander

Starting this January forty (40) humanities seminars will kick into action, online. Campuses get to see higher numbers in upper-level humanities seminars, while at the same time expanding the curriculum they present to students. Note, too, that the teaching methods are not uniform.

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OPINION: When it comes to liberal-arts education, online learning changes only the tools

The Hechinger Report

For me, it was pretty easy to imagine how I’d supplement the online pre-recorded lectures from my MOOC with discussions with Wesleyan students on the Zoom platform. I never found the right way to do that in my MOOCs because there were so many students enrolled and they were not moving through the material together.