#mri13
-
Redefining MOOC completion rates
A few posts back I posted Katy Jordan's data on completion rates for MOOCs. It's set me thinking that we're probably being harsh in terms of how we define enrollment on MOOCs, which in turn makes completion rates look worse than they actually are. In formal education there are different ways of defining who has enrolled on a course. I'm pretty sure there is a cooling off period, so if a student drops out within the first week or so, they don't count as having enrolled in the first place (can anyone confirm this from their uni?). So, taking MOOC enrollment figures to be the number who signed up for…
-
Find time for courage
At the MOOC research conference last week Amy Collier gave an impassioned call for courage in relation to MOOCs, and in the way I interpreted it, openness in general. As she put it "some things are too important not to have courage". This quote came back to me last week, when I was in discussions about open access publishing at the OU. The responses from others in different departments were sensible and cautious, a wait and see strategy. I couldn't disagree with them, but part of me felt, 'remember when we used to take risks and do stuff because we thought it was right?' This isn't a moan about that…
-
Design responses to MOOC completion rates
Well, my previous post on data for MOOC completion rates caused a bit of a kerfuffle on Twitter. It was interpreted by some as saying "ONLY completion rates matter". And also of not taking into account other factors such as what learners who don't complete get from a MOOC. That seems rather like criticising Alien for not being a rom-com to my mind – they're doing different things. This research was showing one aspect with the quantitative data available. It is part of a bigger picture which ethnographic studies, surveys and more data analysis will complete. It wasn't attempting to be the full stop on MOOC research. Anyway, here is…
-
Completion data for MOOCs
As I mentioned in the previous post, I am doing some Gates funded research on MOOCs. My part was learning design analysis, while Katy Jordan has been looking at factors influencing completion rates. All this work is Katy's, I take no credit for it. She would blog it, but is about to have her first baby any day now, and strangely that has taken priority over blogging about MOOCs, so she said I could blog it on her behalf. There will be a paper that details the full results and methodology, so I'm just giving some highlights here. Katy collected completion data from 221 different MOOCs. The range was limited…
-
The Learning Design of MOOCs
I got some Gates funding for the MOOC Research Initiative to look at two things: completion data, and learning design MOOCs. The first part allowed Katy Jordan to finish the work she had started in mapping various factors from over 200 MOOCs that influence completion. You can see more of her work here, and I’ll blog on that later. My part has been using the tools we’ve developed at the OU for learning design, building on Grainne Conole’s work. We use two main tools: the Activity Planner and the Module Map. The first maps student activity across 6 categories, eg assimilative, productive, etc. This is a good way to think…
-
The Battle for Open
<This is how we do protest in Wales> We have a new issue of JIME out, which is a special issue on the OER 13 conference. There are some excellent papers, so go read them. Then, when you've read all those, read my opinion piece, The Battle for Open. I'm going to write a book about this over the next few months, so if you think it's an awful idea, please let me know. The article is effectively the first chapter of that book, which sets out the overall argument. My argument goes something like this: Openness has been victorious in many ways, but at this point of victory the…
-
The iceland of Dallas
<Dallas deathstar in the snow – this may, or may not, be a metaphor> I was at the MOOC research initiative conference in Dallas, Texas last week. As Jim and others have reported, we got caught in icemageddon, but that's a whole other (war) story. I'll be doing a few posts about the conference. It was a fantastic meeting, well done George Siemens, Amy Collier and Tanya Joosten for putting it together. I got to have some great conversations, and meet people I've know online for years. Which is by way of apology for my first post being a bit negative. This one concerns one aspect of the conference…
