Do we need another MOOC platform?
2012 is the year of the MOOC. Audrey Watters has written an very good overview of MOOCs in 2012.
In the last year we got the announcements of new platforms to deliver MOOCs. This week the 12 UK universities announced another new platform.
I made a list of the platforms I know:
| Platform | Founded | Company | Certification | Open | # courses | Remarks |
| Udacity | Jan 2012 | for profit USA |
yes | no | 20 | |
| Coursera | Apr 2012 | for profit USA |
yes (not all) | no | 210 | Only high-ranked universities can join |
| edX | May 2012 | not-for-profit USA |
some | will be | 9 | |
| Coursesites | Apr 2012 | for profit USA |
yes | yes | 2 | is based on the full Blackboard Suite |
| Instructure Canvas | Oct 2012 | for profit USA |
? | ? | 24 | is based on their open-source LMS |
| Google Course Builder | Sep 2012 | for profit USA |
? | yes | 5 | Is running on Google Apps Engine |
| Class 2 Go | Sep 2012 | not-for-profit USA |
? | yes | 3 | is open-source |
| VentureLab | Sep 2012 | not-for-profit USA |
? | ? | 5 | developed by Stanford students |
| Udemy | Feb 2010 | for-profit USA |
yes | no | ? | Focus on individual teachers. Originally paid courses, now also free courses |
| OpenMOOC | Jul 2012 | not-for-profit Spain |
? | yes | 1 | platform is open-source. |
| Candena Scholar | Oct 2012 | not-for-profit Germany |
yes | ? | 1 | Started by Leuphana University |
| FutureLearn | Dec 2012 | for-profit UK |
? | ? | ? | started by 12 UK universities |
If you know any other platforms or can fill in the question marks, please leave a comment.
Features
If you take a look at the features of the different platforms, I see three distinct characteristics:
- Most of them have a very specific instructural design in the course. Most is based on the traditional instructor-led model.
- They have limited features, but the features they have are working really well.
- They log everything and use this data actively (learning analytics). Some of them even are saying that they will even sell this data.
The traditional LMS-providers should really take a good look at the MOOC platforms. They can definitely learn from it!
Conclusion
As you can see is that most of the platforms are created by a US for-profit company. So I encourage initiative from outside the US, especially the ones that are really open. Improvements in the instructional design are also very welcome.
7 comments
Comment from: Wilfred Rubens [Visitor]
Instructure Canvas is a open source LMS. Not specifically meant voor MOOC’s. OpenU can be used for MOOC’s as well. More than 400 participants in an Dutch spoken online masterclass about tablets in education is rather ‘massive’.
Comment from: willem [Member]
@ Wilfred
Instructure offers their LMS also as a MOOC platform. See this announcement: http://hackeducation.com/2012/10/31/instructure-canvas-network-moocs/
I haven’t seen any announcements of using OpenU as a MOOC platform. When can we expect to see this?
Comment from: Marja Verstelle [Visitor]
Good idea to put the overview together, Willem.
What you see, and I think the reaction of Wilfried illustrates this too, is that after the first wave of MOOC-platforms now a range of platforms is being re-positioned or expanded to become hybrid platforms for MOOCs, online paid courses, and flipped classroom all together. Which I think is a interesting development.
I see different types of bundling:
- platform plus collection of open courses like Coursera, EdX, Udacity
- mainly platform, like OpenMOOC or Blackboard
- or a new type of LMS for individual institutions that supports any type of blended learning, flipped classroom or MOOCs an institution would like to offer by themselves, such as the provider I looked at today for the first time, Echo360.
Comment from: Frank de Langen [Visitor]
Zie http://wp.me/p1sWQ6-3s for my comments.
Comment from: William Swinton @ListenLearnLead [Visitor]
Stanford enters the fray:
http://www.openculture.com/2013/01/stanford_makes_open_source_platform_class2go_available_to_all.html
Comment from: willem [Member]
@ William
Class2Go is already on the list of platforms
Comment from: Afreh Kwame [Visitor]
I believe there should be different platforms for specific courses.The current mooc courses only concentrate on how best the instructor can offer the materials for the students but there is not real time support for the student learning process. What if there is a platform where student can do calculation of their maths problems for instructors to easily see the errors and then offer support? Instead of calculating the answer some where and feeding the current systems with answer only to say yes you are right or wrong.
I propose Viope AI platform for maths and programming.
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