Communications of the ACM
Confirming the Mooc Myth
Credit: IQ Online Training
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are neither transforming education nor yielding large profits, but more time is needed to experiment with various applications, said participants at a conference hosted by the University of Texas at Arlington. Preliminary results from the MOOC Research Initiative, a grant program founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and administered by Athabasca University, were presented at the conference.
The University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education presented research that analyzed the study habits of 1 million students in 16 Coursera courses between June of 2012 and 2013. "Emerging data . . . show that [MOOCs] have relatively few active users, that user 'engagement' falls off dramatically especially after the first one to two weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the course end," the study says. Speakers noted that MOOCs can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop, which has created a problematic scenario in which some institutions develop MOOCs while others buy them.
However, some say more time is needed to research MOOCs and test different uses, as students are benefiting from the courses in unexpected ways. For example, Wake Technical Community College and Udacity created an introductory algebra review MOOC to prepare students for college placement tests, but found that more than two-thirds of users were using it to improve their general math skills.
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