To measure a MOOC’s value, just ask students
Owen Youngman, a professor of digital media strategy at Northwestern University who recently taught a MOOC explores what value students placed on the "statement of accomplishment" that they earned for passing his course.
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Completion data for MOOCs
Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University in the United Kingdom, highlights some research findings on factors influencing MOOC completion rates.
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Open educational resources: Definition, facts, opportunity, examples
As part of their Key Concepts of Online Learning series, Contact North explores Open Educational Resources (OER) which are "teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property licence that permits their free use or re-purposing by others."
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Georgia Tech admits first cohort ahead of online master’s degree program launch
The Georgia Institute of Technology has admitted 401 students to the low-cost online master’s degree program in computer science, which was created in partnership with Udacity.
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Learning and performance support systems
Stephan Downes provides an in-depth overview of the Learning and Performance Support Systems (LPSS) program, a new $19 million 5-year initiative at the National Research Council that he will be leading.
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MOOC research conference confirms commonly held beliefs
Inside Higher Ed reports on the first day of the MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) grantee conference at the University of Texas at Arlington where speakers have "backed up commonly held beliefs about the medium with data."
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Penn study shows MOOCs have relatively few active users, with only a few persisting to course end
According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania, MOOCs "have relatively few active users, that user engagement falls off dramatically - especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course - and that few users persist to the course end."
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What modularity means for MOOCs
Harvard Magazine reports on a recent faculty meeting where Peter K. Bol, the Harvard Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, discussed MOOCs and noted that "faculty members are increasingly interested in using edX technology to produce modules - short units covering a single subject, background information, a problem set, or elements of a larger course - rather than entire courses."
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Professors in deal to design online lessons for A.P. classes
Professors at Davidson College in North Carolina will design modules for high school students in Advanced Placement courses and make them available through the College Board and edX.
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Competency-based education: An (updated) primer for today’s online market
Phil Hill updates his primer on competency-based education (CBE), which he describes as a subset of outcomes based education, where the outcomes "are more closely tied to job skills or employment needs, and the methods are typically self-paced."
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