By Stephanie Parisi

Stephanie Parisi is the lead instructional designer for the Coursera MOOC Initiative at Emory University

At our December 3rd Brown Bag Seminar, I presented on the MOOC initiative at Emory. Massive Open Online Courses are finding their place at institutions of higher learning, and Emory is no exception. Partnering with educational platform provider Coursera, the Emory Coursera team in Faculty Services (LITS) has produced eight MOOCs since 2012. The ninth course, “Ebola: An Evolving Epidemic,” will be released in early 2015.

Enrollments in these courses of study have ranged from 5,000 to 50,000 learners and have been developed by faculty across all subject areas. As you can imagine, there are several challenges associated with offering courses of this massive scale, one of the biggest is data and analytics.

Still considered to be in a state of experimentation, there are little to no established measures of quality for MOOCs. One reason for this may be that MOOCs serve different purposes depending on the institution providing them. But regardless of purpose, most institutions share the common goal of continual course improvement.
Continue reading Emory’s MOOC Initiative Update →