Why is MOOC a HOT thing?
20/08/2014
- Not all MOOC courses offer certificates and even if they do they are not worth institutional credit.
- Do not rush into enrolling yourself in a course based on appearances alone. Some online courses offer high quality graphics and animated videos, while others may just show an instructor with a tablet in front of a camera. Try not to dismiss a course just because you don’t like the quality of the videos. Test out a class for a couple of weeks to get a sense of the instructor’s personality, interest and commitment level, and the content and its relevance to the subject.
- Participants in a course may be highly educated professionals, high-school students or non-native English speakers with limited vocabularies. Hence, their feedback might vary or sometimes be non-constructive.
- MOOC offers courses from social psychology to behavioural economics and from climate science to social media. As you are not under pressure to complete for high grades, pick up diverse classes and learn things you wouldn't normally in a traditional institutional environment.
- As MOOC is fairly new, so are a lot of the people who teach at them. As many of them are trying out the process for the first time, be prepared for a mid-course policy or content shift as the instructor learns what works.