The messy realities of learning and participation in open courses a... When two worlds don’t collide: the marginalisation of open educational practices outside academia. Perryman, Leigh-Anne and Coughlan, Tony (2014). In: OER14, 28-29 April 2014, Newcastle, UK (forthcoming). Full text available as: A canyonesque gulf has long existed between open academia and many external subject communities. Since 2011, we have been developing and piloting the public open scholar role (Coughlan & Perryman 2012) - involving open academics discovering, sharing and discussing open educational resources (OER) with online communities outside formal education in order to help bridge this gulf.
In 2013 we took the public open scholar into Facebook (Perryman & Coughlan, 2013) to reach an international audience of autism-focussed Facebook groups in India, Africa and Malaysia, with a combined membership of over 5000 people. Performing the public open scholar role within Facebook led to our learning from group members about new resources produced outside formal education, for example by voluntary sector organisations, government and professional bodies. Open learning at a distance:lessons for struggling MOOCs.
MOOCs and the funnel of participation. Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) are growing substantially in numbers, and also in interest from the educational community. MOOCs offer particular challenges for what is becoming accepted as mainstream practice in learning analytics. Partly for this reason, and partly because of the relative newness of MOOCs as a widespread phenomenon, there is not yet a substantial body of literature on the learning analytics of MOOCs. However, one clear finding is that drop-out/non-completion rates are substantially higher than in more traditional education. This paper explores these issues, and introduces the metaphor of a 'funnel of participation' to reconceptualise the steep drop-off in activity, and the pattern of steeply unequal participation, which appear to be characteristic of MOOCs and similar learning environments.
Learning from open design: running a learning design MOOC. Open Learning at a Distance: Lessons for Struggling MOOCs. Initial trends in enrolment and completion of massive open online courses | Jordan. Katy Jordan The Open University, UK Abstract The past two years have seen rapid development of massive open online courses (MOOCs) with the rise of a number of MOOC platforms. The scale of enrolment and participation in the earliest mainstream MOOC courses has garnered a good deal of media attention. However, data about how the enrolment and completion figures have changed since the early courses is not consistently released.
This paper seeks to draw together the data that has found its way into the public domain in order to explore factors affecting enrolment and completion. Keywords: MOOCs; higher education; massive open online courses; online education; distance learning Introduction There are clearly great potential individual and societal benefits to providing university-level education free of some of the traditional barriers to participation in elite education, such as cost and academic background. Methods Limitations Results and Analysis Trends in Total Enrolment Figures Conclusions. A Mixed Methods Look at Self-Directed Online Learning: MOOCs, Open Education, and Beyond. Documenting Life Change from Open Educational Resources, OpenCourseWare, and Participation and Massive Open Online Courses. Self-Directed_Lrng_MOOCs_Open_Ed_AECT_Bonk_et_al_Friday_paper_session--Title-Change.