MOOCs creating global recognition and a worldwide community

As CU expands its free massive open online course (MOOC) offerings, it has realized fortuitous benefits: CU MOOCs are earning the university worldwide recognition and fostering a global village.

Since joining with Coursera in 2012, CU MOOC lectures have tallied 7 million views, the equivalent of nearly 8,000 traditional full semester courses. With nearly 700,000 enrollments, online learners have come from around the globe.

MOOCs are an important tool in our efforts to use technology to expand our reach and improve learning. Along with strategies such as flipped classrooms and learning assistants, we are reimagining how we deliver education. Our traditional online programs across our four campuses have seen enrollments increase from 32,000 to more than 43,000. We are in the midst of a university-wide initiative to expand our online efforts on all our campuses.

MOOCs are an important complement to those efforts. The 22 MOOCs offered by 18 faculty members from 11 departments across CU’s campuses are promoting CU’s impact around the world. Sixty-four percent of learners reported that their perception of CU had improved, and 80 percent reported they would recommend CU to a colleague or friend.

The learning is reaching beyond the online experience into real-world experience. With only three days’ notice, Roger L. Martinez-Davila, center at right, invited thousands of current and former CU massive open online course students to a Feb. 1 Madrid lecture at Spain’s pre-eminent research center -- Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas.

Hosted by Ana Rodriguez’s Power and Institutions in Medieval Islam and Christian project, Martinez-Davila, assistant professor of history at CU Colorado Springs, engaged the audience with his lecture, “Global Citizen Scholars: Crowdsourcing Discovery and Manuscript Transcription via Massive Open Online Courses.”

Martinez-Davila says the MOOC is enabling him to teach in the “global village” and make human connections abroad.

“Not only that -- the MOOC students outnumbered the academic scholars in the room, which signals how important MOOCs can be to bridging the divide between academia and the public,” he said. “This is how we rebuild the place of the humanities in the civil society.”

MOOCs are making headway financially, as well. The University of Colorado has developed two MOOC specializations, partnering with Coursera to create clusters of courses in data warehousing for business intelligence and power electronics, certificates for which provide learners value in the marketplace.

“We already had a data warehouse MOOC in the works when Coursera approached us to develop a full specialization – it took off from there,” said Deborah Keyek-Franssen, associate vice president for digital education and engagement. CU received an advance from Coursera to help launch the data warehousing for business intelligence specialization.

“We used the advance for faculty overload, teaching assistants, video production, and instructional design support,” she said. That funding allowed the Denver campus to get five MOOCs out in record time.

Michael Mannino, associate professor of information systems, and Jahangir Karimi, professor of information systems in the Business School at CU Denver, are facilitating the MOOC specialization. It’s composed of four individual MOOCs and culminates in a capstone. Students pay for a validated certificate on Coursera’s signature track – for single courses, or for the entire specialization.

“That means we have a revenue source from MOOCs,” Keyek-Franssen said.