MOOC (massive open online course)

A course published online at no cost to enrol in, authored and staffed by an institution, with a paid credential attached at the end. It is the corpus's sixth curriculum form, and the only one that does not come from an individual with a repository.

What separates it from the other five

meta-curriculum, build-from-scratch, executable-curriculum, clone-project and problem-archive are distinguished by how they teach — pointers, primitives, notebooks, a product, an indexed problem set. A MOOC is not defined that way. It is a form defined by who stands behind it and what is sold: a named institution, instructors it employs, a fixed sequence and length, an enrolment event, and a certificate for money. Harvard's free listings advertise "Audit for Free / Add a Verified Certificate for $219."

Three consequences follow from that difference:

• There is something to complete, so completion is measurable. A GitHub curriculum has no enrolment, no cohort and no completion event; nobody can say who finished developer-roadmap. A MOOC can be measured, which is why the only outcome evidence in this spoke (mooc-pivot) is about MOOCs and why it does not transfer to the repositories by arithmetic.
• Scope comes from a faculty. A repository's scope is chosen by its author, an interview canon's by the exam. A MOOC catalogue's scope is the shape of the departments that can staff it — Harvard's free offer is a third humanities and 2% mathematics.
• The teaching is free and the credential is not. The paywall sits after the learning rather than around it, which is a different bargain from every self-published curriculum here, where there is no credential at all and the commercial layer is a book, a course or a newsletter beside the free thing.

What is known about whether they work

Badly, and from the inside. mooc-pivot took every MITx and HarvardX course through May 2018 — 12.67 million registrations, 5.63 million learners — and found second-year retention falling from 38% to 7% across cohorts, growth concentrated in the most affluent HDI quartile, and completion flat over six years even among learners who paid or declared an intention to finish. The authors' reading is that MOOCs became "a complementary asset for learners within existing systems" rather than a new route in.

The form is still being published at scale eight years later, and the catalogue that publishes it shows none of those numbers.

Related

harvard-free-courses-catalog · mooc-pivot · meta-curriculum · build-from-scratch · executable-curriculum · problem-archive · clone-project · harvard-university · synthesis