The Maturing of the MOOC

The Maturing of the MOOC
Meyer concludes that, for educators, the MOOC concept has doubtful validity. They
are to be welcomed, not so much for any educational benefits, but for their capacity
to generate debate about teaching in general.
MOOC Press sentiment tracker
To capture the distribution of general content on MOOC, we have performed a simple
mechanical analysis of the first 50 items returned for the Google search query MOOC on
25 April and then again on 29 May. We have rated them for tone. This table is embedded
in our document and can be accessed by right-clicking the chart.
The extent to which the search engine algorithm is indexing pages of MOOCs and MOOC
listings suggests the producers of these pages are producing SEO (Search Engine
Optimised) content. The proportion of negatively scored articles is low at 8%.
Figure 16: MOOC Google search result index – top 50 (25/4/13) (online readers: to
see data right click the pie chart & select “edit data”)
When performing this exercise a month later, we were able to observe a difference. The
proportion of search results delivering aggregator pages and MOOC courses was rising
significantly. So was the proportion of negative-scored news articles, rising to 12%. This is
only a snapshot and cannot be taken as a sign of a trend. However, it does suggest that
sentiment tracking around the MOOC phenomenon could be undertaken.
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