Massive, Open, and Course Design |e-Literate

"Martin Weller has a great blog post up about course design responses to MOOC completion rates. He starts by arguing that, while completion rates are not everything in MOOCs, they are not nothing either. A lot depends on whether you think completion is an important metric to meet the course goals because, for example, the course is designed to help remedial students pass into a non-remedial track, or whether having students explore the content in a non-comprehensive way accomplishes your course goal. (Martin brings up an analogy by Stephen Downes that nobody complains about the low newspaper completion rates, which I have never heard before and which I love.) This is good stuff, but it starts us down the path toward a more radical re-examination of how we think about course design. Because while Martin is focusing primarily on course goals and how those should determine metrics, he’s beginning to raise the question of how individual learner goals should influence course design. And once you start asking that question, it changes everything ..."