E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

Last week Audrey Watters blogged about the question "What has the impact been of MOOCs on MIT OCW usage?". The answer from Steve Carson:

The site has seen ?record levels of traffic? since the MOOC craze began: 22.3 million visitors in 2012, up 25% over 2011.

We notice the same thing on ocw.tudelft.nl. Our number of visits has increased with 77% in 2012 in comparison to 2011. Especially in the 4th quarter of 2012 (Europe is always a little behind the US) our daily number of visitors increased from 550 to 800 . This grow continues in 2013, although we had some negative impact because of our university cookie wall.

I see the interest in MOOCs as really positive for the Open Education Ecosystem. All university boards are talking about it and that also leads to more attention towards OpenCourseWare and Open Educational Resources.

For my university we are also looking at the combination of OCW and MOOCs. We have decided to publish our MOOCs via EdX with an open license. To maximise exposure we will also publish the course materials of the moocs on our OpenCourseWare website. The content that is created in our MOOCs will also be used in our online master programmes and in our regular campus education.

So we are putting money in creating awesome content, but we are using the content everywhere we can.