Slides from “The Revolution will be Televised” MOOCopalypse panel

The SIGCSE 2013 panel on “The Revolution will be Televised” on MOOCs and the impending MOOCopalypse was well attended and led to some great discussion. Our entire slide deck is available here.

My favorite part of the session was the response to my comments about access to MOOCs in Africa, i.e., that’s a motivating claim for many (“MOOCs provide learning opportunities to the developing world, like in Africa!”) while the reality is that there is very little access in Africa. We had two people in the audience then take the microphone and talk about their experiences in Tanzania and Sudan. The former department chair in Tanzania said that the MOOCs don’t contain the content yet that they need. The faculty member from Sudan said that only 50% of Sudan has access to the Internet. She said that the connected half doesn’t know that MOOCs exist.

My thanks to Mehran Sahami for organizing the panel, and to my fellow panelists Nick Parlante (eternal optimist about MOOCs) and Fred Martin (hero to the rebel forces battling the MOOCopalypse, for pushing his vision of MOOCs for flipped classrooms) for an engaging session!

The Most Thorough Summary (to date) of MOOC Completion Rates

If you haven’t seen this visualization yet, I recommend it.  Really interesting to explore rates of completion from various xMOOC providers.  I thought the observation below was amusing.

Does it bother anyone that we get this data from a graduate student from The Open University but not from any of the xMOOC providers who claim the power of data analytics in their platforms?

via The Most Thorough Summary (to date) of MOOC Completion Rates |e-Literate.