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With rapid growth in the number of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and students, it was only a matter of time before corporate American sat up and took notice. Among those interested is the research firm Bersin by Deloitte, which has started a working group on MOOCs.

There has been considerable excitement over the potential for massive open online courses (MOOCs) to provide education for unlimited numbers of students and at low cost. Over the past 400 years, …

A theme that emerged in the sessions at the Learning with MOOCs Workshop was the need for collaboration across industries to continue to improve the effectiveness of MOOCs.

At a workshop, we focused on the need to generate a more reliable process for assessing the effects of various aspects of MOOCs. The power of our current analytics suffers from the absence of a systematic approach. Much of the information we have to draw from exists solely in anecdotal form. For example, teachers who have been teaching a certain course in a traditional classroom style for years try implementing MOOCs and find that their students perform better or worse with the new style. However, it is difficult to compare the claims of these anecdotes because of the large number of variables involved.

Members of the Extension Engine team were lucky enough to participate in an exciting workshop that is bringing together professionals from a variety of industries to discuss the future of MOOCs. The workshop, titled “Learning with MOOCs: A Practitioner’s Workshop” covered material from sessions and key insights gleaned from our experience here to promote education about MOOCs and how to best implement them.