M.Ed, Pondicherry University

1. BY PRAJNA
PRIYADARSHINI BARIK
MOOCS

2. About MOOCs
 MOOCs stands for Massive Open Online Courses.
 First MOOCs was emerged from Open Educational
Resource Movement.
 The term MOOC was coined by Dave Cormier in
2008 of the university of Prince Edward Island in
response to a course called connectivism and
connective knowledge.

3. History of MOOCs
 The first MOOC was the course “Introduction to
Artificial Intelligence”, offered in 2011 by Sebastian
Thrun, professor of Stanford University, and Peter
Norvig, Director of Research at Google. It reached a
registration of 160,000 students from 190 countries.
 After this success, Sebastian Thrun founded the
MOOC service provider ‘Udacity’ along with David
Stavens and Mike Sokolsky.
 In February 2012, Udacity offered its first course
named “Building a Search Engine" taught by David
Evans from University of Virginia.

4.  In 2012 ,coursera and edx provides the MOOC
service.
 By the end of 2013, Coursera leads the market with 5
million users from 190 countries and 566 courses
offered in 12 different languages by 107 educational
partners. edX has 1.65 million users from 255
countries and territories and 125 courses offered by
30 partners.
 year 2012 was named by The New York Times as “the
year of the MOOC”

5. What is MOOCs
 MOOCs is an online course aimed at large scale
interactive participation and open access via the web
. It is a development in the field of distant education.
 It facilitates the option of free and open registration
,a publicly shared curriculum and open ended
outcomes.

6. MASSIVE :
 It allows access to a very large number of students, much
larger than a face to face class or a traditional online
course.
OPEN :
 On one hand the course should be open to everyone and
does not require any prerequisite qualification or level of
performance in earlier studies.
 On other hand the educational resources are freely
available in different websites,blogs,wikis or multimedia
repositories.

7. ONLINE :
 The course is offered via Internet and doesn’t
require physical attendance at a classroom.
 Anyone from anywhere in the world with an
Internet access can participate in these courses.
COURSE :
 It should have some learning objectives to be
achieved after certain activities in a given period of
time.

8. What are done in MOOCs
 Firstly MOOCs are delivered for fixed time interval
that ranges from 2-4 weeks.
 During this short duration the particiapnts are
expected to compehend and attend the learning
activities via online.
 Lastly at the end of the course evaluation process
goes on to award academic degrees.
 The evaluative tests are either objective or subjective
which are to completed online.

9. Classification of MOOCs
 It establishes two types of MOOCs:connectivist
(cMOOCs) and commercial (xMOOCs).
 cMOOC stands for connectivity or collectivist MOOC.
These MOOCs put emphasis on students
constructing their knowledge, creativity, autonomy
and social and collaborative learning.
 In a cMOOC environment, the participants share
information and engage in a teaching-learning
experience through technology-mediated
communications. Learning happens through
dialogue, interaction, and exploration.

10.  xMOOC stands for eXtended MOOCs. xMOOCs are the
most popular type of MOOCs. They are offered through
commercial or semi-commercial platforms, such as
Coursera, edX and Udacity.
 These MOOCs are based in a traditional university
teaching. Thus, they are organized around a central
instructor and a core curriculum using mainly pre-
recorded video lectures and quizzes with no emphasis in
networking.
 A significant difference between a cMOOC and an
xMOOC is their developers. In a cMOOC, there are a
group of individual scholars building the course. In an
xMOOC usually there is one or more higher education
institutions behind it.

11. Features of MOOCs
1. It don’t require any entry requirements for
enrolment.
2. Enrolments to MOOCs is not regional based.
3. MOOCs are offered through online.
4. MOOCs usually run 2 or 3 times a year.
5. The participants of MOOCs spend 1-2 hours for
around 5 weeks.In exceptional cases 2-5 months.

12. Major MOOCs providers
 Coursera : It is the world’s biggest MOOC platform .
 EdX : It is the academic results of joint work of two
famous universities i.e. Havard and massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
 SWAYAM : Under this ,professors of IITs,IIMs and
central universities offer online courses.
 Futurel Earn : It is the latest MOOC platform that
comprises of 12 major universities in UK.

13. MOOC online registration

14. Course Outline in MOOCs
Welcome to Explore Statistics with R!
 In this course you will learn statistics through programming using
examples from the health sciences. The overall aim is to develop your skills
in basic data handling and analysis with R.
Learning outcomes and Content
After the course you will be able to:
 Use R to perform basic statistical analyses
 Based on the type of problem and a given data set, make a suitable choice
between a few common statistical methods
 The content and the specific learning outcomes for each week are as
follows:
Week 1, September 9-15: Get to know R
 Download and install R
 Explain how R differs from other statistical analysis solutions
 Take advantage of the r-project website and the r-community, such as as
documentation, conference, journal and discussion forum

15.  Use command line for simple operations and graphical output
 Run R from a USB memory
 Run R online
Week 2, September 16-22: How to import and clean data in R
 Find, import, visualize and clean data in R
Week 3 September 23-29: Statistics under the hood:
distributions and tests.
 Account for how statistical distributions can be used to design
hypothesis tests.
 Select and calculate a few common parametric tests with R
Week 4 September 30 – October 6: Non-parametric tests
 Account for how resampling can be used when distributions are
unknown.
 Perform non-parametric tests with R
Week 5 October 7-13: Visit the research frontier
 Use published workflows to make statistical analysis in R

16. Learning Activities
 Each course week offers a number of learning activities designed for you to
develop an understanding of how statistics works through active
experimentation, and to develop your programming skills in R. You can
learn through:
 Short video lectures on statistics
 Video demonstrations of how to perform statistical analyses in R. We
recommend you to pause these demonstrations and try the different
commands in R
 Assignments and questions, these provide you with feedback and can be
tried as many time as you like.
 Discussion forums for interacting with your peers and the course
staff. Although you can work through the material at your own pace, please
be aware that the Course Team will be discussing content on a set weekly
schedule.
 Graded questions that determine your course grade and give you feedback
on your progress.

17. Recommended reading and course literature
 There are a number of books in basic statistics that can
guide your learning. In this course we do not use any
particular book or published text. We recommend that you
search for open source literature available through the
internet.

18. How MOOC is helpful for higher education
Here are a few of the effects MOOCs have had on our colleges or
universities:
 It represents open access, global, free, video-based instructional
content, problem sets and forums released through an online
platform to high volume of participants aiming to take a course or to
be educated.
 It promise to open up higher education by providing accessible,
flexible, affordable and fast-track completion of courses for free or
at a low cost for learners who are interested in learning.
 MOOCs bring new opportunities for innovation in higher education
that will allow institutions and academics to explore new online
learning models and innovative practices in teaching and learning.

19. Pros and Cons of MOOCs
Pros of MOOCs:
1. Courses are offered for free
2. Access to courses offered by professors at the top schools
3. Courses are available to a vast and diverse audience across
the globe
4. Learners’ performance can be monitored easily using the
data captured during the start of courses
5. Both professors and learners get world-wide exposure, thus
improving pedagogical techniques and knowledge sharing
6. Can be used as a tool in a blended learning program, where
students can access more information than what is provided in
the class

20. Cons of MOOCs-
1. Can’t provide for personalized courseware and attention
from a tutor
2. It is difficult to keep track of students’ assignments and
involvement
3. Learners with disabilities and a poor Internet
connection can’t use MOOCs
4. Language can be a barrier while offering MOOCs
5. MOOCs can’t be used as a credit-earning course at
universities