A study from Stanford University reported that
1.9 million people around the world have registered for at least one of its massive
open online courses (MOOCs) and that four million hours of instruction have
been delivered since 2012.
Stanford Online: 2013 in Review also found that 73% of the students for its OpenEdX courses were male and that
most students came from the United States. In addition, 40% of the students
spent between one and 20 minutes each week with the MOOC materials, while 32%
spent more than an hour in study.
The Stanford Office of the Vice Provost for
Online Learning (VPOL) has issued 66 grants to encourage experimentation and
innovation by faculty. Among the initiatives is a project to create scalable
virtual labs and a nine-week course on statistics in medicine that showed a
much higher rate of active users when compared to other MOOCs, according to
data from the course.
“Stanford’s vision is much broader than
MOOCs,” John Mitchel, the Stanford vice provost who directs VPOL, told Campus Technology.
“We’re thinking about how we will be educating students for generations to
come.”