Massive Open* Online Courses (*Some Restrictions May Apply)

By Audrey Watters. San Jose State University has released its report on the spring pilot program it ran with Udacity. The NSF-funded research doesn’t really offer any surprises here: student “effort, measured in a variety of ways, trumps all other variables tested for their relationships to student success.” More analysis of the report from Inside Higher Ed, Phil Hill, and Michael Feldstein. Timed with an appearance on stage at Techcrunch Disrupt by Sebastian Thrun and California Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, Udacity announced the Open Education Alliance, a partnership with several tech companies, which has jack shit to do with “open education,” but hey, it’s co-opted “MOOC” so why not this phrase too.

Google is "joining the “open Edx platform.” It’s not really clear what that entails – I mean, other than making “open” even murkier – as it says it will continue to maintain the open source code for its Course Builder software “but are focusing our development efforts on Open edX.” Slate calls the partnership a “YouTube for MOOCs,” so the comments section (“forums”) should be an awesome place to learn. See also: MOOC.org.

Coursera announced this week that it’s earned $1 million in revenue from its Signature Track courses. (The company has raised some $65 million in venture funding.) According to its blog post, “Over 70% of the students earning them already have a bachelor’s degree or higher.” One happy customer says that "The Verified Certificate boosts my credibility in my new role as CTO of a startup. We use gamification in our products for employee growth.”

The HarvardX Neuroscience MOOC MCB80x is running a Kickstarter to raise funds so that students in the class will all get a “spikerbox,” a DIY neuroscience kit made by Backyard Brains. (I covered Backyard Brains here.)

Peking University has joined Coursera.

MOOCoW. Because someone had to do it.

ISTE is running a MOOC. Well, it’s a STEM conference, but marketed as a MOOC. Because of course.

HarvardX has released enrollment data for its courses, with 43% of participants coming from the US. More numbers and an interactive visualization via The Harvard Crimson.

Karen Head wraps up her Chronicle series on the “First-Year Composition 2.0” MOOC she taught on the Coursera platform, with a look at what was “successful” and not about the course. An excerpt:

“I don’t think any of us (writing and communication instructors) would rush to teach another MOOC soon. For now, the technology is lacking for courses in subject areas like writing, which have such strong qualitative evaluation requirements. Too often we found our pedagogical choices hindered by the course-delivery platform we were required to use, when we felt that the platform should serve the pedagogical requirements. Too many decisions about platform functionality seem to be arbitrary, or made by people who may be excellent programmers but, I suspect, have never been teachers.” More...