"All of these MOOC platforms appear to justify their status by promoting curricula that are equivalent to campus-based courses, with a strong focus on content delivery and an emphasis on the rigor and formality of their assessment methods. However, some of the most interesting and innovative practices in online education have emerged by challenging these very ideas; loosening institutional control of learning outcomes and assessment criteria, shifting from a focus on content delivery to a foregrounding of process, community and learning networks, and working with more exploratory assessment methods - digital and multimodal assignments, peer assessment and group assignments, for example."
The article states: Increased communication with the instructor - "Qualitative findings indicate that in addition to promptness, the quality of feedback, and the willingness of faculty to meet student needs are viewed as important to student persistence." (p. 33-4)
It made me wonder how we manage this in relation to MOOCS where communication with those who run the course is more limited.
SRL-MOOC study - categories assigned to learners in Change11 that were emerging from their data analysis included 'lurkers'. More discussion on this in the context of xMOOCs or cMOOCs is given here.