Online Learning Update

BY MERIS STANSBURY, eCampus News

For institutions eager to help their students not only leap into the job market, but enter a future-proof career, these fields of study are wise investments. As students become more concerned with leveraging their postsecondary education for entry into the job market, colleges and universities must look beyond traditional fields of study to ones that directly lead to future-ready careers. Future-ready, or future-proof, careers refer to careers that not only have a significant number of current job openings, but whose openings are expected to increase in the future. These careers also offer competitive salaries, and are available in multiple markets (i.e. business, education, healthcare, etc.). Using data from job-hunting site Glassdoor, CareerBuilder, Economic Modeling Specialists Intl., as well as recent research from the education sector, eCampus News lists three burgeoning fields of study that any campus would do well to incorporate into their curricula.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/fields-of-study/

By Sarah Kuta, Daily Camera

The University of Colorado is starting to see some revenue from the free, massive open online courses it offers to the world through the website Coursera. Though course content is still free, students are beginning to pay for certificates showing they’ve completed a CU course or a multi-course unit in the same subject. Since September, these online course certificates have generated roughly $110,000 across the CU system, a number that is likely to go up this spring with the launch of new multi-course units, said Deborah Keyek-Franssen, associate vice president for digital education and engagement for the CU system. That’s been somewhat of a welcome surprise, as CU did not necessarily expect to make money when it began offering the courses three years ago, Keyek-Franssen said.

http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_29802803/cu-system-reaping-benefits-massive-open-online-courses

by SCMP

“Worldwide, OERs and MOOCs are being offered free of charge, as a philanthropic and altruistic movement, and as a testing ground for offering effective learning online,” says Dr Yuen Kin-sun, director of the Educational Technology and Publishing Unit at The Open University of Hong Kong. “We’re still at an early, rather anarchic stage, where many courses carry no or only a nominal cost, and are frequently delivered by leaders in their field.” According to MOOC aggregator Class Central, there are now about 4,200 MOOCs offered by more than 500 universities around the world, with the number of students who signed up for at least one course hitting more than 35 million in 2015, roughly twice as many as in 2014.

http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1932278/massive-open-online-courses-are-getting-bigger-hong-kong-universities

by IAN TUTTLE, National Review

First thing first, Trump University was never a university. When the “school” was established in 2005, the New York State Education Department warned that it was in violation of state law for operating without a NYSED license. Trump ignored the warnings. (The institution is now called, ahem, “Trump Entrepreneur Initiative.”) Cue lawsuits. Trump University is currently the defendant in three lawsuits — two class-action lawsuits filed in California, and one filed in New York by then-attorney general Eric Schneiderman, who told CNN’s New Day in 2013: “We started looking at Trump University and discovered that it was a classic bait-and-switch scheme. It was a scam, starting with the fact that it was not a university.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/432010/trump-university-scam

by John A. Byrne, Fortune

Since 2012, some 2.7 million people have enrolled in Wharton’s 18 MOOC courses. More importantly, the school has awarded 54,000 verified certificates since 2012 and 32,000 verified certificates in specialization courses since April of this year. What started as something of an online experiment will bring an additional $5 million in revenue to Wharton in 2015. Through it all, Wharton has firmly established itself as the leading business purveyor of MOOCs. It was the first business school to offer a MOOC, the first to offer a specialization, or series of related courses, on Coursera, and can boasts one of the highest MOOC enrollments of any business school in the world. No less crucial, the school is now doubling down on its bet on MOOCs. Over the next 12 months, Wharton plans to launch at least two dozen new online offerings, including its first three SPOCs (small private online courses) on digital marketing, gamification, and advanced product design.

http://fortune.com/2015/12/22/wharton-online-learning/

by MarketsandMarkets

The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) market is estimated to grow from USD 1.83 Billion in 2015 to USD 8.50 Billion by 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.0%. The report on the MOOC market considered 2014 as the base year and the forecast period from 2015 to 2020. MOOC market aims at providing online education platforms to evaluate the platforms during their development and deployment phase and ensure that platforms implemented adhere to the international standards. The report aims at estimating the market size and future growth opportunities of the MOOC market across different segments, such as platforms, courses, services, end-users, and regions.

http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/massive-open-online-course-market-237288995.html

By DAVE EISENSTADTER, GazetteNet

Long touting its small, seminar-style classes, Smith College is making a foray into the opposite extreme, creating a Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC. The course, “Psychology of Political Activism: Women Changing the World,” will be available in March through the platform edX, run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Smith Professor Lauren Duncan, 50, who developed the class, believes it is not normally taught in a MOOC setting. “Most are ‘how to program’ or ‘calculus’ and have talking heads lecturing,” she said. “We don’t teach that way at Smith normally.” In designing the course, Duncan relied on Smith students who enrolled in her class on the same topic in the spring semester. The students each picked an activist featured in the Sophia Smith Collection in the Smith College archives.

http://www.gazettenet.com/home/19840969-95/women-activists-subject-of-smith-college-massive-open-online-course

By Beth Luberecki, Washington Post

If you’re considering getting a graduate degree, a MOOC (massive open online course) can be one way to check out a university or program. Completing a MOOC can give you an indication of whether you want to enroll in a traditional master’s program. “They can be a great way to find out in a short period of time if that subject interests you or not,” says Elaine Shuck, president of the U.S. Distance Learning Association. These free online courses help give you an indication of a professor’s teaching style and expertise. “You could get a good sense of what a particular faculty member is like and whether or not it’s someone you want to work with,” says Edward Maloney, executive director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown University.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2015/09/14/massive-open-online-courses-moocs-can-help-you-achieve-the-next-step-in-your-career/

by Kirk Pinho, Crain’s Detroit

Depending on whom you ask, universities benefit in a few different ways. For some, the upside is that the courses may sow seeds for the MOOC students to eventually enroll at the university, generating revenue. For others, there are educational benefits in that they give professors a sort of educational sandbox in which they can experiment with new and emerging methods of delivering content and course themes. And some argue that the benefit is largely social in nature by offering high-level educational opportunities to a group of students that may otherwise be unable to afford them. “They provide the general populace with an opportunity to have lifelong learning experiences and exposure to new content,” said Geralyn Stephens, associate professor, clinical, in teacher education in Wayne State University’s College of Education.

http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20150830/NEWS/308309998/massive-online-courses-grow-whats-in-it-for-the-universities

by Journalist’s Resource

A 2015 report from a research consortium at Harvard University and MIT provides new data on the MOOC project that the two universities jointly launched in 2012. One of the largest surveys of MOOCs to date, it builds on a series of reports released in 2014 that focused on the joint project’s first year of operation. The new report, “HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online Courses,” includes data collected between July 2012 and September 2014. Researchers used newly available data and surveys to better understand who the participants are and how they take advantage of the free online courses offered by the two institutions. The findings are based on 68 courses across HarvardX and MITx, 1.7 million participants and 10 million hours of participation.

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/education/massive-open-online-courses-moocs-harvardx-mitx

by The Pitt News Editorial Board

Students should be aware of the alternative resources available to them for free — such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) — because standardized tests just don’t tell the whole story. Open source textbooks have gained popularity in the growing market for free higher education materials, but MOOCs aim to boost students’ access to college in an even more pivotal way. One nonprofit consortium called EdX offers students video lectures and discussion forums to engage with one another. EdX’s MOOCs are a gateway for students of all income levels to prove their ability to excel in a college environment. Universities such as Harvard, MIT, the University of Texas and Caltech offer complete online versions of their prestigious classes — for free. Universities sometimes directly accept a student that excels in one of their MOOCs. “Given that we know how rigorous MITx classes are, seeing a student’s performance in that class can help calibrate us to their readiness for an MIT education,” says Stuart Schmill, MIT’s Dean of Admissions.

http://www.pittnews.com/opinions/article_3ea28354-d1d5-11e4-8c03-4fe81c53d6d9.html

by MarketWatch

MOOCs appears as a very lucrative and commercially interesting solution for many companies looking to implement effective training programs for employees, MOOCs have the potential to revolutionize the corporate learning industry. Visiongain believes that 2015 will be a pivotal year and one of significant growth for MOOCs market as vendors address demands of higher education providers, schools and organizations. Not only will the MOOCs market flourish across education & learning sector. This growth will also generate additional demand across many industries especially wireless infrastructure, big data and cloud computing. The IT sector will also witness huge growth through widespread implementation of Big Data to derive maximum value from the valuable data collected via MOOCs and Cloud services for the seamless delivery of MOOCs no matter where you are located. As a consequence, Visiongain expects global MOOCs revenue to reach $1.5 billion in 2015.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/massive-open-online-course-mooc-market-2015-2020-meducation-distance-open-e-learning-in-higher-education-enterprise-2015-03-17

By Jeremy Allen, MLive

The University of Michigan recently took another step forward in its push for innovating teaching as the school launched its first U-M-only massive open online course — a health-related class open to all levels of students across all three U-M campuses. The course is titled “Understanding and Improving U.S. Healthcare: Special U-M Student Edition,” and is taught by Dr. Matthew Davis, a professor of pediatrics and communicable diseases and of internal medicine, and other courses. Approximately 800 students are enrolled in the course, which doesn’t surprise Matthews, who expected the course to be a popular choice among students interested in the MOOC model.

http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2015/01/u-m_offers_first_student-only.html

By: Priscilla Alvarez, USA Today

“We want to engage our faculty in efforts like this to want to continue to offer four each year,” says Joseph Burns, dean of the University Faculty at Cornell University. Cornell University offered their first four MOOCs last spring, serving more than 55,000 people worldwide, according to a university news release. While the courses are still available for viewing, the university is adding courses to go live in the spring. The response from faculty encouraged the addition of courses. Professor Marianne Krasny is preparing for her first MOOC at the university in the spring. Krasny is teaching Civic Ecology: Reclaiming Broken Places, which will cover human interaction with ecological systems as well as provide service learning opportunities.

http://college.usatoday.com/2014/11/05/cornell-to-add-massive-open-online-courses-in-2015/

By Caroline Levander, Houston Chronicle

Like many of its peers in Texas and elsewhere, Rice has developed a portfolio of MOOCs – now numbering more than 40 – for hundreds of thousands of learners, and we show no signs of slowing down. The costs of this endeavor have been substantial, and the return on investment – at least in dollars – thus far has been negligible, to say the least. So one might well ask, particularly at a university that prides itself on its smarts, why? Why do this expensive and difficult thing? What’s the value proposition for having award-winning faculty creating digital education assets for the masses? And even more pointedly, aren’t you eroding your own business model by “giving away for free” what students and their families are spending hard-earned money to acquire? The answer is as simple as the question: It’s all about the assets.

http://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Levander-In-Texas-higher-education-massive-open-5816611.php

by Tony Dreier, Streaming Media

Video in education has moved beyond simply capturing classes and letting students review online. Video is truly changing the way institutions are delivering education. Progressive institutions are delivering “Global Classrooms” where students—and even multiple professors—are located in classrooms around the globe. At the other extreme, institutions are delivering education to mass audiences through online video. Multiple business models are being developed, including charging for classes, providing them for free, and even offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Hear about the challenges and successes from those who are experimenting with these new business models.

http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/U-of-Chicago-3-Challenges-Creating-Massive-Open-Online-Courses-99848.aspx

By Denny Carter, eCampus News

Coursera recently sought to answer that question, drilling down into enrollment data to see which classes, exactly, women were taking on the popular Coursera platform. Food and nutrition topped the list of Coursera classes women prefer, with more than 60 percent of enrollees in those classes identifying as female. Teacher professional development ranked second with almost 60 percent female enrollment. Medicine, arts, and health and society came in a close third with more than 50 percent female enrollment. But again, it was STEM courses and related fields that saw low levels of female enrollment and participation, according to Coursera’s findings.

http://www.ecampusnews.com/top-news/women-online-890/

By Mike Bush, ABQ Journal

After a tentative, first step into the world of Massive Open Online Courses last semester, the University of New Mexico this fall is offering three MOOCs, which, even before they are set to begin, already have more enrollees than UNM’s entire student body. UNM’s first MOOC, last spring, was Professor Greg Heileman’s Web Application Architectures. Then – and now – it was described by the university as an experiment. It was also wildly popular, with more than 48,000 students enrolling from 192 countries around the world, about 10 times what Heileman had expected.

http://www.abqjournal.com/444094/news/unm-expands-massive-online-courses-after-early-success.html

by christian tams, Herald Scotland

But where are Moocs leading us? So far, there is little evidence of regular education being pushed aside. While experimenting with online courses, many Scottish universities have expanded on-campus teaching, especially at graduate level. It would seem Moocs are designed to complement, not replace traditional modes of education, and that is where they hold real promise. Online access education permits academics to engage with much larger groups of students. Prominent US courses on questions with broad mainstream appeal, such as Michael Sandel’s course on justice, perhaps the most successful so far, are taken by upwards of 100,000 participants.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/agenda-free-online-learning-has-massive-potential-to-open-and-expand-minds.24534073

by the University of Pennsylvania

Data from a University of Pennsylvania study of massive open online courses offered by Penn’s Wharton School suggest that MOOCs aren’t a threat to traditional business programs, but rather an opportunity to expand to underserved markets. The findings were published today in the Harvard Business Review. The study is the first of its kind to focus on MOOC participants taking business classes. The researchers were Ezekiel Emanuel, Penn’s vice provost for global initiatives; Gayle Christensen, executive director of Penn Global; and Brandon Alcorn, Penn Global project manager. They surveyed more than 875,000 students enrolled in nine MOOCs offered by Wharton. They found that business MOOCs do not appear to be cannibalizing existing programs but are reaching at least three new student populations: those from outside the United States, especially those in developing countries; foreign-born Americans; and under-represented American minorities.

http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/penn-study-massive-open-online-courses-not-threat-traditional-business-schools