Emergence Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) Education
By GERALD P. FRIAS
Halawig – Gogon Elementary School,
Goa District
Massive Open Online Courses don’t always provide an academic credit, they give learners the useful grounding in the subject matter and may provide necessary background for further education or certification and may be patterned on a College or University course or may be less structured. With learners today earning more substantive credentials and, in some cases, academic credits through MOOCs, the authors designed a study to investigate the benefits and costs to learners who are engaging in a series of open, online courses that provide a culminating non- degree credential.
According to the New York Times, 2012 became “The year of the MOOCs” as several well-financed provides, associated with top universities, emerged, including Coursera, Udacity and edX. Dennis Yang, President of MOOC provider Udemy suggested in 2013 that MOCCs were in the midst of a hype cycle, with expectations undergoing a wild\ swing. During a presentation at SXSWedu in early 2013, Instructure CEO Josh Coates suggested that MOOCs are in the midst of a hype cycle, with expectations undergoing wild swings. Dennis Yang, President of MOOC provider Udemy, later made the point in an article for the Huffington post.
Many universities scrambled to join in the “next big thing”, as did more established online education service providers such as Blackboard Inc, in what has been called a “stampede.’’ Dozens of universities in Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia have announced partnerships with the large American MOOC provider. By early 2013, questions emerged about whether academia was “MOOC’d out.’’ This trend was later confirmed in continuing analysis. The industry has an unusual structure, consisting of linked groups including MOOC providers, the larger non-profit sector, universities, related companies and venture capitalists. The Chronicle of Higher Education lists the major providers as the non-profits Khan Academy and edX, and the for-profits Udacity and Coursera.
The larger non-profit organizations include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the American Council on Education. University pioneers include Stanford, Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Caltech, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, and San Jose State University. Related companies investing in MOOCs include Google and Educational publisher Pearson PLC. Concerned about the commercialization of online education, in 2012 MIT created the non-profit MITx. The Inaugural course, 6.002x, launched in March 2012. Harvard joined the group, renamed edX, that spring and university of California, Berkeley joined in the summer. The initiative then added the University of Texas system, Wellesly College and Georgetown University. In September 2013, edX announced a partnership with Google to develop MOOC. Org, a site for a non-xConsortium groups to build and host courses. Google will work on the core platform development with edX partners. In addition, Google and edX will collaborate on research into how students learn and how technology can transform learning and teaching. MOOC.org will adopt Google’s infrastructure. The Chinese Tsinghua University MOOC platform XuetangX.com (launched Oct. 2013) uses the open edX platform. Before 2013 each MOOC tended to develop its own delivery platform. EdX in April 2013 joined with Stanford University, which previously had its own platform called class2go, to work on Xblock SDK, a joint open source platform. It is available to the public under the Affero GPL open source license, which requires that all improvements to the platform be publicly posted and made available under the same license. Stanford Vice Provost John Mitchell said that the goal was to provide the “Linux of online learning. This is unlike companies such as Coursera that have developed their own platform. By November 2013, EdX offered 94 courses from 29 institutions around the world. During its first 13 months of operation (ending March 2013) Coursera offered about 325 courses, with 30% in the Sciences, 28% in arts and humanities, 23% in information technology, 13% in business and 6% in mathematics. Udacity offered 26 courses. The number of courses offered has since increased dramatically: As of January 2016, EdX offers 820 courses and Udacity offers more than 120 courses. According to FutureLearn, the British Council’s understanding IELTS: Techniques for English Language Tests has an enrollment of over 440,000 students.
In the start of this pandemic, the birth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) serves as new model and flexible platform used for variety of delivering and teaching content online to any person who wants to take a specific course, with no limit on attendance and free Web-based educational offering with a designed to enable the participation of large numbers of geographically dispersed learners. initially, the government set out to investigate the costs and benefits of MOOCs from the perspective of the institutions offering them, mostly colleges and universities. Among the things we heard from these institutions was that MOOCs helped the learners extend their reach and improve access to education, helped them build and maintain their brand both in the United States and abroad and inspired many instructors to reconsider their teaching methods and experiment with innovative strategies. Indeed, in a few cases, this led to documented gains in student learning. MOOC related data provided fodder for research on teaching and learning with a few new lessons about online learning transpired from MOOC based research, such as how students engage in courses and use course materials.
But, as a researcher, teachers and as normal individual we must wisely have observed that none of these insights were successfully applied to improve the notoriously low course completion rates. The different Open Online Courses are readily available at the tip of your hand. Now that learners can earn a more substantive credential and appropriate way to learn something new while in the comfort of their new home and meet new friends through online world. It is flexible and be knowledgeable at the comfort of our home while the threat of this virus is on the air. Indeed, learning should not stop. We must work hand in hand to continue the quality of education. We are tasked to deliver and implement the plans and programs of Department of Education. At the end, we are the teachers of today and of the future-ready and prepared. Teaching and learning process will not stop, it will continue amidst any difficulty and struggle.