Author: Brian S McGowan, PhD

Before Adam Van Arsdale began taping his anthropology course to show online, he was used to standing in front of perhaps 20 Wellesley College undergrads. Now when he talks about Australopithecus, he has to worry whether the 19,000 people who registered for his Massive Open Online Course — enough to fill TD Garden — think he should have shaved that morning, and what they will tweet.

“It opens you up to a lot of complaining,” the assistant professor said, recalling the support one student enjoyed after he griped on Facebook about the way Van Arsdale phrased a question on natural selection. “Fifty people ‘liked’ that negative posting.”

Massive open online courses — known as MOOCs — have been around for years, but recently they have taken off. Mostly free, on topics as wide-ranging as “The History of the World from the 1300s’’ to “Warhol’’ to “Diabetes,’’ the online courses are giving the common person access to elite professors. Along the way, they are bringing Hollywood-style concerns — wardrobe, continuity issues, social media buzz— to the halls of academia. With tens of thousands of students or more sometimes registering to watch a single professor, the word “star” is being used to describe people more likely to spend time with The New York Review of Books than a personal masseuse.

“Now I have to worry about what shirt I’m wearing,” said David Cox, an assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard.

via As the online education movement grows, Hollywood-style concerns — wardrobe, social media buzz — are coming to academia – Lifestyle – The Boston Globe.

Introduction
Nowadays, nearly half of the undergraduate students in the United States come to college grounds for counteractive work before the start of their standard credit-bearing classes.  In course of time, the prospective of free online college classes have bewildered the educators, and they are now emerging with the promise of harnessing online materials to deal with the toughest challenges in American higher education.

To add to the energy, the decreasing state budgets have impelled in collecting an enormous fee at public institutions and reducing the number of seats in classes available for graduate students. Nevertheless, in this circumstance, the online materials have served as a boon as these have been able to impart help to majority of students in making an entrance to college and earn a graduate degree in time.  For addressing the dual problems and helping students in graduation, universities have began experimenting by the addition of the new “massive open online courses” or MOOC for the purpose of delivering the most excellent college teaching to anyone with an Internet connection at free cost that once happened to be within the means of only an inadequate number of campus students at an elevated cost.  Furthermore, these massive open online courses, or MOOCs, also seem to play a role in harnessing the power of their huge enrollments for imparting education in new methods, applying crowd-sourcing proficiency for online discussion forum and grading simultaneously with the chance in utilizing the skills of professors for the usage of online lectures and setting aside on-campus class time for interacting with students.

MOOCs thus, stand apart from earlier online learning programs in their distinct, open, social nature.

via MOOCs Can Be Further Improved To Decrease Attrition Rate – EdTechReview™ (ETR).