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Stephen Downes was asked (along with Dave Cormier and George Siemens): "How might it be possible to show that cMOOCs are effective for learning, in the sense of providing evidence that institutions might accept so as to support opening up more courses to outside participants (a la ds106, Alec Couros' EC&I 831, etc.)? Or, more generally, providing evidence that participation in and facilitating cMOOCs is worthy of support by institutions... What I'm looking for are criteria one might use to say that a cMOOC is successful. What should participants be getting out of cMOOCs?"

"I want to know whether we can determine whether a cMOOC has been "effective" or "successful." That's so general as to mean almost nothing. " blog post by Christina Hendricks

A blog post talking about a research study of self-regulated learning in the Change11 cMOOC, and linking to earlier post with initial findings from the study (no final results yet).

Each type of MOOC has all three elements (networks, tasks and content), but each has a goal that is dominant.

...scholars of international education have always warned against "a one-way transfer of educational materials from the rich north to the poor south will amount to a wave of 'intellectual neo-colonialism.'" But, again, because the MOOC movement is dominated by providers eyeing the world "market" for education, whatever they proclaim to be their motive, their attempts to make MOOCs "accessible" to international learners goes to show that they are either ignorant or unwilling to acknowledge geopolitical dynamics that shape learning experience on a global scale.

The academic conversation on MOOCs is starting to polarise in exactly the talking-past-one-another way that so many complex conversations evolve: with very smart points on either side, but not a lot of recognition that the validity of certain key points on one side does not undermine the validity of certain key points on the other. I regret this flattening of online learning into a simple binary of 'politically and financially motivated greed' on the one hand and 'an opportunity to find out more about learning' on the other. Some of both in different situations can be true.