help us review 2013 MOOC

[chris macrae]

Proposal BRAC Iradio Academy

2013 was a year in which professors might have found out what a huge gap there is between what many of them teach and what millions of youth most want to action learn and evolve into livelihoods..

 

unless you hold that thought you may undervalue the entrepreneurial revolution that moocs can be (which of course is what the PR lobbies of 99% of expensive bricks and mortar university  intend) - you are unlikely to see how many of the 20 greatest anti-youth monopolies old education is spiraling

 

turn to one of the most oddly rushed assumption of the biggest mooc platforms:  that they have nothing to openly learn from real free universities -some of which such as south africa's have a decade more experience than they have - see http://erworld.tv or search some combination of blecher and maharishi, google, branson, virtually free university

 

other problems moocs have relate to trust and collaboration - if  there is any knowledge I value sharing most - I'd far rather see it there 365/24/7 on khan academy than go up and down according to the peculiar time rhythms of a mooc platform and the anti-collaboration ledge it requires of its students http://normanmacrae.ning.com/forum/topics/2014-dream-curriculum-for... 

 

2014 sees the first mooc we know of that is designed around a curriculum that didnt exist before (september 2013) when a world leading chamge summit was hosted in new york

 

how can http://coursera.org/course/changetheworld  starting jan 2014 be improved on?

 

next time a summit things of transforming into a mooc we'd suggest more youth at the summit and khan academy type production facilities everywhere available - that way youth and leaders may create some ola (let alone some 10 times more economic AHA)- the most valuable 9 minute or less training models viewed from how many youth viralise and action them

 

better yet such a change summit might feature the most collaborative ngos in the world where they too have implanted khan academy type labs into their everyday grassroots innovation and social labs

 

both of these ideas will be celebrated as millions of youth have 2 years to prepare for the greatest festival atlanta has staged since the olympics- an action learning festival of job creation and millennium  collaboration goal re-editing that any capital with a job creating future for youth can link into http://youthcreativelab.blogspot.com http://erworld.tv htp:

1. Reclaim Open Learning

   open.media.mit.edu/‎

   •  

   
   Open like the web. Learning by everyone. For everyone. Reclaim Open Learning brings

   together innovators who are building the future of higher ed. divide

    2013 was also the year when obama pleaded for help - if you are youth and university-bound use the net to create a massive open online collaboration guide to which universities you rank as offering value for what- this will be 100 times more economic than anythhing DC government can ever publish on the subject

   latest exceptional reporting research team dialogues at entrepreneurial revolution world

   [1webs include blecher http://maharishiinstitute.org/  ; chowdhury www.women4empowerment.org  ; foerster at www.newworld.ac   ; javalquinto http://economiaynegociossociales.blogspot.com/2013/12/first-school-...  http://maharishiinstitute.org/ , CIDA since 1999 Taddy Blecher in Johannesburg has show that educators can create millions of jobs with youth - how can we help him with his work and how's this connect with your work;macrae family has argued since 1972 that the net generation can make tremendous human progress if and only if educators, economists and all who make the biggest resource integrate youth job creating into the way their worldwide purpose and impact is valued

[chris macrae]

interesting to compare our review with eg kollers - please tell us who else's review you'd like posted here side by side

https://www.edsurge.com/n/2013-12-31-daphne-koller-moocs-can-be-a-s...

2013 has been a year of incredible growth for MOOCs, and Coursera has evolved more rapidly than we could ever have expected. We hit (and surpassed) a triple milestone of 100 partner institutions, 500 courses, and 5 million students. The demand for quality online education resources is simply staggering.

As is typical for developments in technology that force us to rethink the status quo of an industry, this growth has been met with some pushback among skeptics. Within online education, we’ve seen this manifest in criticism of student retention rates and demographic biases. Its natural for early results to be judged against old guidelines and metrics of success for traditional education, but at Coursera we see the outlook for retention and demographic diversity differently.

Among our priorities in the coming year, we hope to shift the conversation around these two dimensions of the learning experience, redefine what it means to be successful, and lay the groundwork for products, offerings, and features that can help students navigate this new medium of learning to meet their own goals, whether that means completing dozens of courses or simply checking out a new subject.

Across all Coursera courses, average retention measured overall is approximately 4%. We can all agree that this would be incredibly low for a 50-seat, on-campus lecture.

However, considering that class enrollment on our platform is completely open, free, and requires no commitment (not unlike reading a book while browsing at the library, or marking a course in a university catalog), we need to reconsider whether it is a failure for thousands of students to complete a course while tens of thousands are browsing (as recently argued very convincingly by Kevin Carey).

When we’ve looked deeper into the intent of users, we find a much more promising picture: One early study of Coursera students found that of those students who said at the outset of a course that they intended to earn a Statement of Accomplishment, roughly 24% successfully completed the course. Surveys of students one month into a course are an even better indicator: Of the “committed” students in these surveys, 64% end up completing all the coursework. (Take a look at figure 4 here. We’ll also be publishing more comprehensive and up-to-date data soon in ACM Ubiquity.) And in our Signature Track option, which offers students the option to pay a fee of around $50 to receive a verified certificate upon successful completion of a course, retention averages around 63% overall, 88% among the committed students and can be as high as 99%.

Clearly, there is more to the retention story than just the baseline numbers.

Beyond retention, we’ve heard questioning of the extent to which MOOCs are living up to their goals of democratizing learning. Recent studies, including a few run by our university partners, indicate that, within certain classes and areas of study, some 80% of students have already earned some kind of degree. This observation is entirely unsurprising, given the significant bias in many of the early courses to the more specialized topics, and the overall phenomenon that early adopters of technology tend to skew toward the educated.

Additional context might be gained from the fact that 40% of Coursera learners are in the developing world. In many of these countries, the few top-quality institutions have very limited capacity relative to the overall demand, and many students are relegated to institutions that are significantly understaffed, where the quality of instruction is highly variable. In such cases, the achievement of a university degree is far from guaranteeing employment, and the high-quality education provided by MOOCs can be a significant factor in opening doors to opportunity--even among the college-educated.

Still, we are deeply committed to expanding our impact on populations that have been traditionally underserved by higher education, and are actively working to broaden access for students in less-developed countries through a range of initiatives, including: working with our Translation Partners to provide translated subtitles for videos, to enable non-native English speakers to learn; localizing our website, so as to make non-English-language students feel “at home” on the site; working with multiple partners, including the US State Department, to hostphysical “Learning Hubs” in locations around the world where internet access is limited; and launching a mobile app to enable students to download course materials for offline viewing in places where connectivity is an issue. As another example, when Coursera first launched, we had very low student enrollment in China. This fall, we began working with a Chinese internet company, NetEase, to help improve the delivery of video contentacross the internet firewall. Now, China is our second fastest growing country in terms of daily student sign-ups, just behind the US. http://c.open.163.com/coursera/home.htm#/courseraHome

MOOCs have come so far in just two years, but we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. As we tackle existing challenges and face new ones in 2014, we are humbled by the response that we have seen at Coursera in these early stages and encouraged by the potential to expand, improve, and innovate to bring our vision for the future of education to life.