Listen, I hear you – many will respond to my title and say “nothing, I want nothing from an xMOOC and I hope they all become the passing fad that they are”. I feel your sentiment, but I think there’s value in xMOOCs, as bad as the pedagogy is behind them.
1. As a training program, which most xMOOCs are, they can be incredibly useful. For base knowledge, and introductory subjects, these are appropriate tools to get learners to the next step. What I want to see from the Coursera’s and Udacity’s is that they provide more flexibility – open enrollments, work at your own pace, maybe even mini-credentials per unit (via badging?) and most importantly, multiple pathways for learning. I would love to see an online course develop multiple methods of instruction that as a student, I could opt into if I’m having trouble with a topic. That would signal to me that it’s about learning, not about profit margins – because frankly, developing multiple methods of instruction for an online course is incredibly expensive. Putting on a venture capitalist’s hat (and it’s ill fitting on me, I will admit), this could give a company an advantage in being able to leverage the data to determine which learning method is best suited to a student/learner, based on prior successes.
2. Better mechanisms for assessment. All the MOOC platforms have great testing banks, but not much else in the way of advancing assessment. Coursera’s peer evaluation is a step towards something good – but it relies on peer assessment without any repercussions – I could do a garbage job of assessing someone and it won’t affect me – there needs to be a balancing here to ensure that peer assessment is valued as important. Programatically, it’d be easy to do, make sure that feedback exists, make sure it’s longer than x characters, and make sure that there’s a mechanism for providing ways to improve (could be as simple as an explicit “ways to improve this critera”).
3. Speaking of open, for the courses that are free, I’d like to see a commitment to openness, meaning that the materials created are able to be repurposed in other contexts, easily acquired, clearly labelled and ideally in a repository. Yeah, like that will happen. The only open in xMOOC is open enrollment.