Law And Policy : Higher Education

Getting into college are the goal for many students, yet MOOCs are a much cheaper option for students who are ready for the material and the challenge. Cristina mendoza is one of three students, along with James Gregory, and Hugh Gallagher, who’s goals are to go into into a good college and acheive success in life. She is one of many smart and diverse people who are capable of completing a MOOC. There are many things, such as her acceptance of her diverse nature, her smarts, and uniquness of her work shows that she is the most capable of taking part in and completing a online learning environment successfully.

With skyrocketing college expenses, traditional higher education is becoming less appealing to the young people of today's day and age. Almost every college ranges from around $35,000 to over $60,000 per year! Public state universities are less expensive, but only for in-state students, and they don't always offer what a student is looking for. Therefore, the only option that a student has is to go to an expensive college, go into debt, take out loans, and hope for the best. Wrong! With the proliferation of MOOC's, students can fulfill their dreams without all the financial stress, at a much lower cost and sometimes at no cost at all. Students can take the classes in their very own bedrooms or anywhere that they feel comfortable. They no longer

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are one of the revolutionary trends in education across the world. Many controversies surround it with some education stakeholders viewing it as very costly but of little value. In addition, other critics consider it a cheaper model of teaching especially in higher education (Vimeo, 2014). Cheaper in the sense many students can be reached wherever they are with no travel needed, by a single instructor, but of little value in the sense that there is no face to face interaction between the student and the instructor. For instance, Dr. Karen Head and Thomas

MOOCS. MOOCs are a tricky subject, thanks to the complicated views faculty hold about the ownership of

Just as robo advisors did to investing, massively online open courses (MOOCs) are attempted to democratize education for the masses. A MOOC, by definition, is an open access online course aimed at reaching a large population via the internet. With higher education under strain due to ballooning costs, online courses have opened of online courses for everyone around the world. Many of the lectures and course material taught are from renowned faculty and insinuations around the

Massive Open Online Courses, shorthanded as MOOCs, are courses that offer the opportunity for students and learners everywhere the chance to take part in an online classroom that often are composed of video lectures, and online assessments. There are no restrictions on who can join the courses providing an incredible accessibility to learning for people all over the world. However, as is common with many central issues, there are a large range of opinions for and against MOOCs. Audrey Watters, a journalist for many publications such as MindShift, and Edutopia, wrote an article for High School Alternative Programs titled, “Massive Open Online Courses Are Overhyped and Have Serious Problems for K-12.” In this article, Watters expresses that she believes that MOOCs are deeply flawed, and largely detrimental to education. Watters states that their graduation rates are particularly low and that not much is known about students that register for MOOCs. However, I believe that Watters is not looking at graduation rates within the right context, and that knowing who the beneficiaries of MOOCs are is not as important as having worldwide accessibility to education.

The first approach to higher education that Bonvillian and Singer confer about is online education. Due to the recent advances in technology, Bonvillian and Singer quotes examples of educational institutions like Kaplan University who registered 78,000 in their online program. Along with this, Bonvillian and Singer state examples of MOOC courses like Coursera and edX offered by Stanford and MIT respectively. Bonvillian and Singer claim that MOOCs can prove to be a valuable addition to STEM education as it provides users with the ability to envision data that helps enhance understanding. However, even in its initial stages, online education

Educators have experimented with various methods of on-line education since internet access became widely available on college campuses. While this has led to a range of online educational practices, the impetus for the modern MOOC is grounded in MIT’s2002 OpenCourseWare initiative (Lowe x). That year MIT professors voted to post their course content online as part of an effort to democratize the education traditionally given only students enrolled at “elite” universities. This move propagated a wave of calls for more “open” university content online. In response to this call, George Siemens and Steven Downes created what is widely consider to be the first MOOC, CCK08 – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge., Decker explains that these two professors at University of Manitoba took a course with 25 traditional tuition-paying students and allowed 2,300 other students to participate without receiving credit (4).

For the initial phase of this exploratory study regarding completion rates, data sets are available through different internet sources that contain all ex post rates. These data sets are publicly available. The first phase will utilize extant data. To attain traditional college completion rates, the National Center for Education Statistics has data sets available for download that can be customized. Since MOOCs are available internationally, the most appropriate data set for this particular quantitative research would include college completion rates by country as a starting point. Additionally, an overall average can be extracted from this data. This would give us the average completion rate for traditional colleges. The next step would be to gather data for MOOC completion rates. Using internet searches there is information available at Class Central. Class Central has complied completion data for all courses offered by Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, which are the three main platforms for MOOCs. The enrollment and completion data for each course have been recorded. Completion is defined by finishing all the requirements necessary for a certificate. Other data, such as course length, institution ranking, and active users, are also recorded on these data sets. This data set includes courses over the span of eighteen months. This information will assist in answering the primary research question: how do MOOC completion rates vary

MOOCs evolved under the idea of “connectivisim”. The idea or belief was expanded by Stephen Downes. His connectivisim theory was very similar to concept of “active learning”. The term “active learning” was the idea of students participating in online discussion boards, watching created video instruction, and doing various types of “webquest” increasing active participation.

Massively open online courses (MOOC) platform rests on “self-service” and utilizing EdX to allow students the opportunity to obtain certificates of completion, versus degrees. The university will pay EdX a fee based on generated revenue for initial courses and “production help” revenue base for course development, with a potential for future licensing. The passing rate is anticipated to increase an estimate 60 to 91 percent, causing scrutiny and angst amongst traditional block and mortar educators; this translates to a speculated decline in educational quality and as well as the demise of trained educators.

This section was derived from an article titled Strengths and Weaknesses of MOOCs by Tony Gates, 19 October 2014.

This section was derived from an article titled Strengths and Weaknesses of MOOCs by Tony Gates, 19 October 2014.

Many colleges and universities believe DE provides the perfect opportunity for sustaining institutional growth (Huett, Moller, Foshay, & Coleman, 2008; Young & Lewis, 2008). Enrollment in distance education (DE) courses at degree granting higher education institutions continues to trend in an upward direction, even while the overall enrollments at the same institutions have recently experienced declines. According to Allen and Seaman (2016), the growth rate of students taking at least one DE course grew from 3.7% in 2013 to 3.9% in 2014 (p. 4). In the same report, it was stated that a total of 2.85 million students took all of their classes at a distance and 2.97 million took some, but not all, courses at a distance in 2014. The number of students not taking any DE courses declined from 434,236 in 2012-2013 to 390,815 in 2013-2014. In the same survey, 63.4% of participating chief academic officers agreed that online education is critical to the long-term strategy of their institutions (p. 5).

Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, have recently come into the public eye as a topic of interest. Whether as an alternative to traditional education, a way to enhance skills in the work-place, or as a way to make education freely available to everyone, many teachers, institutions and students are currently participating in MOOCs. However, as with any new technology, MOOCs are not yet fully understood, in terms of their impact, quality, and effectiveness. In this vein, the MOOCs have the potential to change the face of education, and how teaching is done, but at what cost, or at what benefit? To analyze this phenomenon from the perspective of work and the education industry, the question becomes whether or not the