When massive open online courses (MOOCs) first captured global attention in 2012, advocates imagined a disruptive transformation in postsecondary education. Video lectures from the world's best professors could be broadcast to the farthest reaches of the networked world, and students could demonstrate proficiency using innovative computer-graded assessments, even in places with limited access to traditional education. But after promising a reordering of higher education, we see the field instead coalescing around a different, much older business model: helping universities outsource their online master's degrees for professionals. To better understand the reasons for this shift, we highlight three patterns emerging from data on MOOCs provided by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) via the edX platform: The vast majority of MOOC learners never return after their first year, the growth in MOOC participation has been concentrated almost entirely in the world's most affluent countries, and the bane of MOOCs-low completion rates-has not improved over 6 years.
a b s t r a c tPresent MOOC and SPOC platforms do not provide teachers with precise metrics that represent the effectiveness of students with educational resources and activities. This work proposes and illustrates the application of the Precise Effectiveness Strategy (PES). PES is a generic methodology for defining precise metrics that enable calculation of the effectiveness of students when interacting with educational resources and activities in MOOCs and SPOCs, taking into account the particular aspects of the learning context. PES has been applied in a case study, calculating the effectiveness of students when watching video lectures and solving parametric exercises in four SPOCs deployed in the Khan Academy platform. Different visualizations within and between courses are presented combining the metrics defined following PES. We show how these visualizations can help teachers make quick and informed decisions in our case study, enabling the whole comparison of a large number of students at a glance, and a quick comparison of the four SPOCs divided by videos and exercises. Also, the metrics can help teachers know the relationship of effectiveness with different behavioral patterns. Results from using PES in the case study revealed that the effectiveness metrics proposed had a moderate negative correlation with some behavioral patterns like recommendation listener or video avoider.
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