Refine
Document Type
- Article (2)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Language
- English (3)
Keywords
- Cultural factors (1)
- Distance learning (1)
- Educational data mining (1)
- Equity (1)
- Large scale analytics (1)
- Learning analytics (1)
- MOOC (1)
- Massive open online courses (1)
- digital education (1)
- e-learning (1)
- experience (1)
- higher education (1)
- microcredential (1)
- online course creation (1)
- online course design (1)
Institute
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer online courses at low cost for anyone with an internet access. At its early days, the MOOC movement raised the flag of democratizing education, but soon enough, this utopian idea collided with the need to find sustainable business models. Moving from open access to a new financially sustainable certification and monetization policy in December 2015 we aim at this change-point and observe the completion rates before and after this monetary change. In this study we investigate the impact of the change on learners from countries of different development status. Our findings suggest that this change has lowered the completion rates among learners from developing countries, increasing gaps that already existed between global learners from countries of low and high development status. This suggests that more inclusive monetization policies may help MOOCs benefits to spread more equally among global learners.
EMOOCs 2021
(2021)
From June 22 to June 24, 2021, Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, hosted the seventh European MOOC Stakeholder Summit (EMOOCs 2021) together with the eighth ACM Learning@Scale Conference.
Due to the COVID-19 situation, the conference was held fully online.
The boost in digital education worldwide as a result of the pandemic was also one of the main topics of this year’s EMOOCs. All institutions of learning have been forced to transform and redesign their educational methods, moving from traditional models to hybrid or completely online models at scale. The learnings, derived from practical experience and research, have been explored in EMOOCs 2021 in six tracks and additional workshops, covering various aspects of this field. In this publication, we present papers from the conference’s Experience Track, the Policy Track, the Business Track, the International Track, and the Workshops.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) remarkably attracted global media attention, but the spotlight has been concentrated on a handful of English-language providers. While Coursera, edX, Udacity, and FutureLearn received most of the attention and scrutiny, an entirely new ecosystem of local MOOC providers was growing in parallel. This ecosystem is harder to study than the major players: they are spread around the world, have less staff devoted to maintaining research data, and operate in multiple languages with university and corporate regional partners. To better understand how online learning opportunities are expanding through this regional MOOC ecosystem, we created a research partnership among 15 different MOOC providers from nine countries. We gathered data from over eight million learners in six thousand MOOCs, and we conducted a large-scale survey with more than 10 thousand participants. From our analysis, we argue that these regional providers may be better positioned to meet the goals of expanding access to higher education in their regions than the better-known global providers. To make this claim we highlight three trends: first, regional providers attract a larger local population with more inclusive demographic profiles; second, students predominantly choose their courses based on topical interest, and regional providers do a better job at catering to those needs; and third, many students feel more at ease learning from institutions they already know and have references from. Our work raises the importance of local education in the global MOOC ecosystem, while calling for additional research and conversations across the diversity of MOOC providers.