My Journey to 100+ MOOCs
2012 was declared as the Year of the MOOC by The New York Times, as that was the year the major MOOC providers — Coursera, edX and Udacity — were born and the world of online education took a huge leap.
Well, what is MOOC? According to Wikipedia, a massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the Web. MOOC provides interactive courses with user forums or social media discussion to support community interactions among students, professors and teaching assistants. A MOOC comprises filmed lectures, readings, quizzes, practice sets, assignments, surveys and even graded projects. MOOCs provide an affordable and flexible way to learn new subjects and/or skills, advance one’s career and deliver quality educational experiences at scale.
A little about the 2012's major players I mentioned before:
Coursera was founded by Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng (both professors of Stanford University that time) in 2012 with a vision of providing life-transforming learning experiences to learners around the world. As of June 2021, they have 5000+ courses, 77 million learners, partnered with 200 leading universities and even received B Corp certification.
edX is an American massive open online course provider founded in 2012 by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As of June 2021, they have 3000+ courses, 110 million enrollments, 35 million users and 160 partner institutes. edX was one of those who opened the classroom through online learning and empowered millions of learners to unlock their potential and learn something new.
Udacity is a for-profit educational organization founded in 2011 by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky offering massive open online courses. In 2015, Udacity started the Nanodegree program, a paid credential program.
Now back to my journey:
It was mid-2013, when I came to know about the concept of MOOC. I was in the second year of my engineering course in University and was very much fascinated by the concept of getting to learn from world class universities from the comfort of home or work place. I took my first MOOC on ‘Startup Engineering’ by Stanford University via Coursera and then another on ‘The Ancient Greeks’ by Wesleyan University via Coursera again. Back then, having high-speed internet in India was not a common thing. I used to go to the Central Library of Assam University to download the lecture videos and then bring them home to study on my personal computer. For completing the quizzes and assignments I used to connect to my cellular data (it was 2G back then in my hometown) and that way I completed my first MOOCs. Also back then Coursera used to provide Statement of Accomplishment for a course completion on free audit. Now they are regarded as legacy certificates and can only be downloaded by the logged-in account.
When I completed those couple of MOOCs in 2013, I never thought one day I could make it to a century or even more. Over the time I registered in many MOOCs on Coursera and edX but couldn’t work on them, completed a very few and left over double dozens in mid-way. By that time NPTEL in India also started to become popular. The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) was initiated by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Guwahati and Roorkee) along with the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and it focused on the engineering and core science courses. I tried my hand on that too and completed a course in 2014 on ‘Introduction to Programming in C’ by IIT Kanpur.
Then came the year 2020, the second Year of the MOOC. Due to global COVID-19 pandemic and long lockdowns in many parts of the world, the MOOC once again started to bloom. Now with 4G and 5G connectivity, and huge improvement in course materials and user-experience, more learners started to flock into the MOOC sites. The year even brought back my old fascination and interest. I decided to start finishing the MOOCs I enrolled in or I have left mid-way before, and this was the period when I completed the maximum number of courses.
From 2013 to 2021 till the time of writing this blog, I have completed over 100 MOOCs from 11 different providers, and in the mid-way of completing some more. Among all those, 70+ courses were from Coursera alone. Coursera will always remain my favorite for its great course materials, well organized presentations, high standard videos and vast range of variety of courses. 25 courses were from FutureLearn, three from Esri and one each from edX, NPTEL, openHPI (by Hasso Plattner Institute), openSAP (by SAP), OpenLearning, University of Tasmania, Online SGU (by St. George’s University) and Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO.
I have mainly studied courses on the fields which I am passionate about like archaeology, history, astronomy, health and environmental sciences, geography, language and literature, and also many courses on the fields I work on as my profession like cloud computing, data science, information technology, etc.
My Top 5 courses will be:
- Archaeology: From Dig to Lab and Beyond (University of Reading via FutureLearn)
- Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology (University of Alberta via Coursera)
- Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space (University of Arizona via Coursera)
- Fashion as Design (The Museum of Modern Art via Coursera)
- Cartography. (Esri)
‘Archaeology: From Dig to Lab and Beyond’ is a fabulous 2 weeks long MOOC. Being a big time archaeology and ancient history enthusiast, this course about excavations was very much interesting to me which narrates from preparing and planning a dig to field school and discoveries to apprentices and museums. ‘Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology’ and ‘Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space’ are two of the great courses I completed on Coursera. From instructors to locations to productions, everything was just well executed. Dino 101, a 12 weeks long MOOC, covers topics ranging from dinosaur anatomy, eating, locomotion, growth, environmental and behavioral adaptations, origins and extinction. Lessons were delivered from museums, fossil-preparation labs and dig sites, where as Astronomy: Exploring Time and Space is a 11 weeks long MOOC covering science and history of astronomy, night sky, tools of astronomy, solar system, exoplanets, galaxies and cosmology.
My Top 5 MOOC providers based of course quality:
- Coursera
- edX
- FutureLearn
- Swayam (now includes NPTEL)
- openHPI
My Top 5 MOOC providers based on best UI/UX**
- FutureLearn
- Coursera
- openHPI
- OpenLearning
- edX
So what makes a great MOOC? There are many criteria which set a great MOOC apart from the rest, and the criteria may differ from person to person and their perspective and needs. As per me, a great MOOC should focus on quality study materials with state-of-the-art video presentation and an interactive and smooth user-interface and user-experience. It should have an active discussion forum, options to download or read transcripts, the recorded lectures should have closed captions and the assignments need to be covering all of the syllabus. When these criteria meet together, it’s a great MOOC for me.
I understand MOOC is the revolution and future of education. Post 2020/2021, the world will go more digital and the COVID-19 pandemic has just shown humanity that many things can be done from within the walls of everyone’s home and high quality learning is one of those. With the advent of modern IT and Artificial Intelligence, things are going to pace up more. We may see MOOCs are even getting upgraded to suit the evolving generation, but this — the 2020 wave of MOOCs — is the start of a bigger picture.
Happy MOOCing!
** Course design and video presentation/editing has also been taken into account for the rankings.
