MOOC certification, and a little more on Self-Paced MOOCs...

Last week I got an email from the MOOC guys running the VLC MOOC, and one of the topics was in the email was all about the certification process. In going through this MOOC (really a self-paced eLearning course, but more on that down below), I would like some sort of proof that I went through it (just in case someone asks), but by and large I really don't care for certification for individual courses. What I care about is the knowledge.

Here is what I got from the VLC:

Class Certification and Class End
The class finishes on 31 May. Participants who have shown activity will be sent a certificate. We distinguish the following activities:
- ActivityClass 0: no activity --> no certificate 
- Activity Class 1: worksheet average < 60% --> confirmation of participation 
- Activity Class 2: worksheet average >= 60% --> qualified certificate
The certificates will be sent as E-Mail attachments in electronic form ready for printout.
By the way, for the future (not for this class) we are thinking about a " Activity Class 3” certificate: All those participants who have reached “Activity Class 2” conditions (i.e. 60 or more percent) will be given the option to gain class credits by means of writing an electronic exam. This, however, involves two pre-requisites:
a) Our university which awards the credits has to agree
b) We will have to charge fees (for this MOOC, which involves 4 ECTS/credits approx. 120,- Euros)
As I said, we are thinking about it. What do you think? Again we are looking forward to receiving your opinion in the class-related forum.
If I were a student, with the potential to transfer the credit into my home institution, or some other institution that I was attending, I think 120 euros is actually not a bad price to pay for a graduate level course! It's going to be interesting to see what the plan is for these xMOOCs going forward. If the courses are the same as their "regular" courses, what's going to be the difference between a $1400 course and a $150-200 fee for a MOOC that shows that you've done all your own work, and you've been assessed by subject experts and getting a university to back that up.


As an aside, there seem to be a lot of self-paced (or mostly self-paced) courses these days that seem to be going after the title of MOOC.  It seems as though MOOCness for them is focusing on the wrong aspect of a MOOC, the massive part.  We've already had self-paced eLearning for quite some time in the form of Web-Based Training. I am sure that these were "massive" in the past, given that these types of self-paced eLearning were used for professional or other educational purposes, thus they now only seem to be capitalizing on the MOOC craze in order to shine a spotlight on their programs.  This seems a bit wrong to me.  What do you think?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the
Read more