Poet Ponders the Digital

Notice that technical courses and courses that were "automated" had higher completion rates.  New study of low MOOC completion rates | Inside Higher Ed : The course with the highest rate of completion was "Functional Programming Principles in Scala," from Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, offered on the MOOC platform Coursera. According to Jordan's research, some 19.2 percent of the 50,000 students who enrolled completed the course.  At the other end of the spectrum was "A History of the World since 1300" by Princeton University, also hosted by Coursera, which reportedly recruited 83,000 students with just 0.8 percent reaching the end.  Five of the top six most-completed MOOCs relied on automatic marking alone, meaning that no peer assessment was required. Courses that relied purely on peer grading generally fared far worse in terms of the percentage of students reaching the end. My assumptions: Technical students do...

I have been contemplating if online learning differs by discipline, especially after reading a few studies on the topic. One of the studies (Xu & Jaggars, 2013), found: The subject areas in which the negative coefficients for online learning were weaker than average in terms of both course persistence and course grades (indicating that students were relatively better able to adapt to online learning in these subjects) were computer science, the applied professions, and natural science. Are the STEM fields that different, in terms of pedagogy and goals, from the humanities? Of course, we could certainly argue that the sciences are often taught divorced from ethics and humanistic concerns, but the teaching methods, objects, and outcomes assessments are my primary concern when reading such studies. Do Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) work better in the STEM fields than in the humanities? The coding course I'm currently working through is offered by a Russian institution...

What does it mean to "teach" an online course? This question might be the most serious question facing colleges and universities as they migrate more courses online. It should be of even greater concern as we move some K12 learning online. When I teach online, I find that students have to write and interact much more than they might in a traditional "face-to-face" course. In a classroom, it is easy for the quiet student to say only a few words. Even the best teacher can call on students only so many times. I prefer groups with lots of discussion, but those can be dominated by a few students. Online, when carefully structured and moderated, can engage more students. It is also easier to determine who is or is not comprehending some topics. At the same time, you must balance moderating against letting students feel like the online space is theirs. It is easy for a teacher to dominate a classroom, real or virtual. Yet, if there are too many or too few studen...

Is it a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) if there is a fee for credits? What should such fees be? Another post to follow with my own thoughts about MOOC designs and practices. UW to offer fee-based courses through Coursera | Local News | The Seattle Times I'll be posting about my own role in a MOOC project later this month.