Myths MOOCS discussed
In last Thursday (06/12) of more than 200 academic institutions from around the world met at a conference organized by the University of Texas at Arlington to hear the preliminary results on the MOOC Research Initiative, a program funded by the grant Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and administered by Athabasca University in Canada .
Several institutions received $ 10 to $ 25 thousand to examine how MOOCS (Education Massive Online) can modify the higher education and the results will be in the next issue of the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning as anticipates Inside Highred site .
The research presented on Thursday was perhaps best summarized by research Conducted by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, Which Analyzed the study habits of 1 million students across 16 Coursera courses between June of 2012 and 2013.A research presented can be summarized with the work done by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education , which examined the study habits than 1 million students in 16 courses Coursera , between June 2012 and 2013 .
“Emerging data … show that online courses Massive Open ( MOOCs ) have relatively few active users, and that ‘ engagement ‘ user drops dramatically , especially after the first two weeks of a course , and that few users clearly persist until the end, ” can be read in a study summary .
This drops the myth that these courses would reach a few thousand students .
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But other expectations are maintained , the cost of production MOOC . that can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars to create ” classes” of MOOC that are consumed and produced by institutions MOOC create two groups of problems , the first is not wanting to seem elitist , while the second is to generate content rejected even by own faculty members .
Christopher Brooks , a researcher at the University of Michigan School of Information said ” maybe this seems obvious ,” he said “A lot of things seem obvious in retrospect,” but the main problem is not even funding .
“How do we make this incredible thing and get our ideas from everyone and not go bankrupt ? This is the challenge . ” This is the challenge.” Said Akiba Covitz , senior vice president of strategic relations for Academic Partnerships , referring to MIT and Harvard .