Are we already entering a post-MOOC era? | ICEF Monitor - Market intelligence for inter... - 0 views
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SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) and SOOCs (Selective Open Online Courses).
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According to some experts, these smaller, more selective programme models may be more than an alternative to MOOCs; they may be the more sustainable and engaging forms of online learning in a “post-MOOC” era.
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As Time Magazine notes, “Advocates say that’s because there are no admissions requirements and the courses are free; they compare it to borrowing a book from the library and browsing it casually or returning it unread.”
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MOOC proponents’ altruistic claim of “educating the world” is a misnomer: MOOCs are really about trying to open a world market, with students seen as statistics more than individual learners; MOOCs are an easy opportunity to cut labour costs by firing existing faculty members and/or hiring poorly trained but cheap course administrators; They are the opposite of customised and do not factor in the location or cultural context of students.
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This year, three of the most important developments in the MOOC arena have been the ideas that: Online content may often complement, not replace, traditional teaching methods and professors; Online platforms facilitate more models than just “massive open” ones; Online courses can be priced variously according to the content, service, and accreditation they deliver.
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And this year, new MOOC platforms have entered the fray, including: UK-based FutureLearn, which registered 20,000 students in its first 24 hours of admission; Australia’s Open2Study, which recorded 100,000 enrolments in just over its first six months of operations this year; China’s Tsinghua University’s XuetangX.com, which includes foreign courses despite some political nervousness about foreign ideas being “imported.”
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In addition, SPOCs and SOOCs – because they are smaller, and sometimes because they are private – have much more potential to be customised to various student profiles or circumstances. For example, Colorado State University-Global (CSU-Global), the only independent 100% online, fully accredited public university in the US, offers the following types of services to different audience groups, at different price points: A leadership training certificate programme (good for university credit) customised for a multinational construction company with managers and leaders in remote sites. Access for a community organisation to the CSU-Global library of leadership topics, “such as best practices in virtual communication or building teams.” The use of CSU-Global curriculum for an international university in its degree programmes, with “courses hosted and taught by CSU-Global faculty.”
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Harvard University Professor Robert Lue, who chairs the committee that runs Harvard’s online experiments under the banner of HarvardX, says that the smaller class sizes inherent in SPOCs allow “much more rigorous assessment and greater validation of identity and that will be more closely tied to what kind of certification might be possible.” He further cautions, “Institutions that sit back and watch … may be in trouble.”
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Have MOOCs grown up so much that we are now… post-MOOC? As this post makes clear, MOOCs have not only proliferated in their current massive, open form, they have also evolved into different, online-enabled models of delivering education. Talking to the BBC’s Sean Coughlan, Harvard’s Professor Lue asserts: “The MOOC represents just the first version of what we can do with online education. And this first version has now been overtaken. We’re already in a post-MOOC era.” As promising as this may be, however, Lue reminds us that there are still questions that remain unresolved related to the continuing move toward online-enabled learning. Specifically related to how the university campus fits in, he wonders, “What is it that a student gets out of being on campus and being in the classroom?” Coughlan picks up where Lue leaves off, asking, “If students on campus prefer learning online, what does it mean for the width: 89px; height: