Low completion rates remain an issue for massive open
online courses (MOOCs). However, that’s not the only measure of success,
according to leaders of the MOOC initiative at Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw,
GA.
Elke M. Leeds, associate vice president of technology-enhanced
learning, and Jim Cope, executive director of distance learning, reported in
the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration that they found success
in the MOOC initiative at KSU by looking at return on financial investment,
branding, and student access.
“The new proposition shifts measures of success beyond
just course completion to include measures that benefit students, faculty, and
the institution,” they wrote in “MOOCs: Branding, Enrollment, and MultipleMeasures of Success.” “Students benefited through access to open educational resources, the acquisition
of professional learning units at no cost, and the potential of college credit
at a greatly reduced cost. Academic units benefited through a mechanism to
attract students and future revenue, while the university benefited through
digital impressions, branding, institutionally leveraged scalable learning
environments, streamlined credit evaluations processes, and expanded digital
education.”
Leeds and Cope determined that if four students
enrolled in the institution’s two-year associated graduate endorsement program
after taking a MOOC, their tuition would cover the production, design, and
delivery costs of the MOOC. The first MOOC did much better than that, with 100
professional learning units awarded and 12 students enrolled in the endorsement
program.
To evaluate the branding effect of the MOOC initiative
at KSU, Leed and Cope documented more than 25,000 Twitter hashtag tweets and
retweets about the program. They determined that 75% of the learners had either
never heard of Kennesaw State or were largely unfamiliar with it, but all were
engaged with learning materials produced by the university.
Leeds and Cope also reported that the program’s video
lectures had more than 80,000 viewers, and nearly 4,000 unique viewers over a
10-month period in 2014. After just six weeks of offering MOOCs in 2015, they
recorded more than 25,000 unique viewers to lectures, 28,000 streaming views,
and more than 6,000 downloads of course materials.
“The traditional measures of success based on
participation, retention, and completion only tell one side of the MOOC success
story,” the authors wrote. “They can drive recruitment, offer cost reduction,
and, in essence, become an educational product with reach far beyond that
typically available to the university.”
