MOOCs, SPOCs and next generation Open Access Learning

Curtin University’s outstanding Autism and Mental Health course has won the prestigious 2023 edX Prize for Exceptional Contributions in Online Teaching and

Towards the end of 2022 I wrote a post about the turbulence being experienced by online education companies that partner with universities. This was on the back of a raft of negative company announcements about their performance and financial health. There’s been a number of changes since then an

Comprehensive list of online course platforms worldwide, offering hundreds of thousands of courses.

FutureLearn’s subscription plan is now comparable in price to Coursera’s, but it doesn’t offer nearly as much.

EdX has launched two Spark Augmented Reality courses from Meta, developed as part of the online learning platform's partnership with Meta Immersive Learning. The goal: to "build a learning ecosystem for the metaverse and give professionals broader access to the tools and education needed to build a career in augmented reality."

When Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were first introduced about a decade ago, many higher education professionals viewed this new arrival as

In 2015 I converted my introductory astronomy course ASTR1001 into a set of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and released them for free to everyone in the world. They have been running ever since to rave reviews and have been taken by 400,000 plus students: more than the ANU has graduated in its entire history.

But the real surprise was when we offered a version of these MOOCs to our on-campus students. I hadn’t imagined that any on-campus student would want to take a purely online course. But, in fact, our enrolment increased eightfold, and the SELT evaluations were spectacular. Why? Partly because these online courses are self-paced and asynchronous i.e. students can watch the videos and do the homework to their own schedule. This is valuable to students who need to support themselves by working. It also means that we can offer these courses multiple times per year – including the winter/summer semesters; popular sessions for students who need to replace a failed unit or catch up on underloading. 

Article: JIME Virtual Special Collection – 2012 to 2022: The Decade of the MOOC

Two online learning experts share lessons gained during a decade of developing and refining massive open online courses (Moocs)

Massive open online courses are the educational happening of the moment. Everyone wants in. No one is quite sure what they’re getting into.

Discover how Coursera makes money, its different segments, revenue growth, margins, and more.

To get an overview of the topics and trends in the research on MOOCs, Class Central has created a list of the most cited research papers on MOOCs.

The brothers announced their new educational initiative, Study Hall, a partnership with Arizona State University and YouTube.

1000s of courses with free certificates and badges from universities, companies, and nonprofits worldwide.

The tech giant Meta, widely known under its previous name Facebook, seems to be eyeing a way to allow users to offer video classes. Since at least las

Universities will also need to carefully consider the relative merits of housing courses on, and offering them via a MOOC platform as opposed to doing this themselves. Whilst it’s easy to make a fairly unsophisticated argument that going it alone means not incurring any 3rd party costs, HEIs need to conduct a cost benefit analysis in reference to their strategy to come to sound decisions.

It’s also worth noting that this doesn’t need to be an either/or decision, in fact a horses for courses approach could be effective, especially where institutions are confident in reaching and recruiting from the target audience themselves and where they have a strong online learning proposition already.

In essence what characterises all of this advice is deliberate, strategic, well-informed and  thought-through decision making in relation to MOOC platform partnerships. Some universities have not always been very rigorous in this respect. 

Nevertheless, as we enter a new era for online education, one in which there seems to be more universities developing partnerships to offer an online portfolio of courses, it will be interesting to observe whether MOOC platform partnerships will play a role in that and what this ultimately begins to look like.