The MOOC Revolution May Be Over, But The Evolution Is Still Going Strong

Posted by Kenneth Ronkowitz on

Having just submitted the final version of a chapter for a book on MOOCs, I was pleased to see an article headlined "MOOC U: The Revolution Isn't Over" (excerpted from a book by Jeff Selingo). The article recalls a 2011 piece in The New York Times titled "Virtual and Artificial, but 58,000 Want Course" about the artificial-intelligence class at Stanford University that got all the attention when 160,000 students in 190 countries took the Massive Open Online Course. That wasn't the first MOOC, but it was the one that got the mainstream media's attention. And the year of the MOOC and the MOOC-madness began.

In 2011-2013, I wrote a lot about MOOCs, taught in a MOOC environment, and did a good number of presentations to educators about the revolution. And I watched the rise and fall of the hype cycle for the phenomenon. That was what led my wife and I to collaborate on a chapter we titled "MOOCs: Evolution and Revolution." We don't believe the revolution is still on, but the evolution is certainly still with us.

Reading another article with the teaser headline, "The MOOC Where Everybody Learned", I continue to see that the skeptics still believe that students who succeed in MOOCs tend to have similar profiles. For one thing, they are students who are already well educated (holding degrees). Another common belief is that other students need coaching and academic support, possibly more of a hybrid course with face-to-face support.

But researchers MIT looked at a physics course (offered on the edX) in 2013 found that students who had spent significant time on the course showed evidence of learning no matter what their educational background.

What really surprised the researchers was that the MOOC students learned at a similar rate as did MIT students who had taken the on-campus version of a similar course. Yes, students who were not well-prepared students scored lower than those with more schooling, but all of them came away knowing more than they did before the MOOC.

Keep in mind that many MOOC participants don't enroll in a MOOC to get grades or credits. They are interested in learning.



 


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