There’s a damning analysis in the latest Science magazine of Massive Open Online Courses – MOOCs – which some people (including, gulp, me) through might reinvent higher education:
We highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world’s most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs—low completion rates —has not improved over 6 years.
Maybe worse is this sentence: “After promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master’s degrees for professionals.”
MOOCs – they’re the Third World call centers of advanced degrees!
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