MOOCs and the on-line Masters Degree

There’s been a lot of interest in Georgia Tech’s new on-line masters degree in Computer Science, offered jointly with Udacity and AT&T. The first offering ran with 375 students, and there are 500 in the pipeline, but readmissions opened again two days ago so this number has probably gone up. PBS published an article recently, written up on the ACM blog.

I think we’re all watching this with interest as, while it’s neither Massive at this scale or Open (fee-paying and admission checked), if this works reasonably, let alone well, then we have something new to offer at the tertiary scale but without many of the problems that we’ve traditionally seen with existing MOOCs (retention, engagement, completion and accreditation.)

Right now, there are some early observations: the students are older (11 years older on average) and most are working. In this way, we’re much closer to the standard MOOC demographic for success: existing degree, older and practised in work. We would expect this course to do relatively well, much as our own experiences with on-line learning at the 100s scale worked well for that demographic. This is, unlike ours, more tightly bound into Georgia’s learning framework and their progress pathways, so we are very keen to see how their success will translate to other areas.

We are still learning about where MOOC (and its children SPOC and the Georgia Tech program) will end up in the overall scheme of education. With this program, we stand a very chance of working out exactly what it means to us in the traditional higher educational sector.

An inappropriate picture of a bricks-and-mortar campus for an article on on-line learning.