New Research Effort Aims to Examine Effectiveness of MOOCs

By Sara Grossman. As more and more colleges experiment with massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a new project hopes to cut through the hype and gauge the effectiveness of the courses. The MOOC Research Initiative, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will award grants of $10,000 to $25,000 to researchers seeking to explore issues such as student experiences in MOOCs and the free courses’ systemic impact. The initiative is aimed at “any group of academics who’ve ‘heard death by MOOCs’ and want to move past the hype and start looking at the actual research around open online courses,” said a co-founder of the project, George Siemens, associate director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University, in Alberta. Mr. Siemens was one of the first professors to teach a MOOC, in 2008. Read more...