Completion of the first UK MOOCs via Coursera

The first MOOCs offered by a British university through Coursera were from Edinburgh, and I completed the one on “E’-learning and digital cultures”. In this week’s Higher, an article provides analysis of the operation and the experiences of instructors and students.

I’ve written previously about my own experiences, so I won’t repeat that. I see some fellow students who became part of my personal learning network are quoted in the article.

Some key facts:

  • 308,000 students enrolled on 6 courses
  • one instructor reckoned he spent 8 hours a week from August to January on MOOC related activity prior to the course starting
  •  in the course I took, 42,000 enrolled, 4500 joined the Facebook group, there were 700 tweets per day using the hashtag #edcmooc and 2000 students joined a Google+ group
  • of the 42, 000 who enrolled, about 17,000 logged in at least once
  • about 2,000 students completed the final assessment
  • cost estimate from development to delivery – about £30,000

And I presume the income was zero, although instructors learnt an awful lot in the process.