MOOCs - How they evolved and what is their current status?

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – How they evolved and what is their current status?

1.     Education has been imparted through teacher-student / delivery – acquisition model since ages.

2.     Earlier, chalk, duster and board use to be the major tools used by a teacher to deliver the content and since last about a decade and a half, power point and other multimedia tools have been used enormously.

3.     Since last about 5 years or so, a revolution in terms of imparting online education has been created by players like coursera.org, edx.com, udacity.com, linda.com and khanacademy.com

4.     There has been a constant debate

-       Whether one should pursue courses on these websites

-       Whether the certificates obtained through these websites are honored by the perspective employers or not?

-       Whether the courses provided on these websites provide enough of knowledge to a learner to make him competent enough to fetch him a job

5.     Originally, Cousera created this disruption in ‘learning scenario’ some time in about 2011 when it started offering many new kind of courses on its website being taught by Professors from renowned institutes of the world like Stanford, MIT, Purdue and Harvard.

6.     For sometime in the beginning many of these courses were kept free where a learner was simply supposed to register for these courses on their website, watch some real creative learning videos, complete some highly diligently prepared and challenging assignments and complete the course.

7.     Courses ranged from interest areas like those in Music, Drama, Paining, Literature, Engineering and what not.

8.     If millions of learners registered for these courses, only thousands of them could complete those due to lack of a commitment and sincerity which comes automatically when one is pursuing a regular course in a class.

9.     But, those whole completed the courses really got benefitted.

10. Of late, all these websites in an attempt to scape up their models have made many of the courses as ‘paid’ courses. As a part of which although you can still learn without paying but to get certificates, you may need to pay an amount equivalent to anywhere between $ 20 to $70 or even more.

11. Quality of the courses have suffered as many such instructors have been enrolled who otherwise might not have qualified to be good enough with the standards these websites had set for themselves in their primitive years.

12. From the large number of mid course dropouts, these websites have learn and deadlines for submission of assignments are not longer that strictly imposed.

13. Once, you complete a course with some minimum threshold of points like 65 %, you become eligible for a certificate for which you may need to pay some amount.

14. In case you pay that amount, certificate is highlighted against your name on your social media pages like Facebook or LinkedIn etc.

15. Although, this has been a too good an effort from all these website owners to come up with such and idea and execute it. But, it seems that quality of the courses and learning quotient has definitely suffered somehow.