Sunday Posts

If 2012 was the 'Year of the MOOCs' as proclaimed by New York Times, 2014 started on a downbeat note, with Harvard Professor Eric Mazur talking about 'MOOC Bust'. It is difficult to understand what accounts for such fickle sentiments, except that current pessimism is just a correction of the hype. There were indeed talk of low completion rates - only a handful of students who register for a MOOC ever completes a course (Times Higher Education reported a figure of 7%, but that seems way too high) - but then completion rate itself is such an old economy model out of sync with Long Tail thinking: Kevin Carey wrote a fairly persuasive piece on why the completion rates of the MOOCs is simply the wrong measure ( 'Pay No Attention to Supposedly Low MOOC Competion Rates' ). There was also the Fast Company article on Udacity founder, Sebastian Thurn, the Stanford Professor whose Stanford course on Artificial Intelligence may be claimed to have started it all. ...

Universitas Global 21, or U21, an online project for international education, changes ownership, with University of Melbourne, its principal backer stopping to fund the project. U21, which made profits first time this year after seven years of losses, will be taken over by Manipal Education, a big private education group in India, which has universities, colleges and corporate training interests. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/09/u21#Comments : "Another One Bites the Dust" The article cited here explains why, possibly, the U21 project failed. However, I do find the analysis quite one-sided, almost as if written by academics of the concerned universities, and would strongly recommend the comments to be taken into account to have a full perspective. I have followed other online education projects and would make some general comments why these projects tend to fail. First, the universities do not have the nimbleness and customer focus necessary to run e-busine...