Tag: MOOCs

Online learning completion rates in context: Rethinking success in digital learning networks
The comprehensive analysis of 221 Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) by Katy Jordan provides crucial insights for health professionals navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of digital learning. Her study, published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, examined completion rates across diverse platforms including Coursera, Open2Study, and others from 78 institutions.
- With median completion rates of just 12.6% (ranging from 0.7% to 52.1%), traditional metrics may suggest disappointment. Jordan’s multiple regression analysis revealed that while total enrollments have decreased over time, completion rates have actually increased.
- The data showed striking patterns in how participants engage, with the first and second weeks proving critical—after which the proportion of active students and those submitting assessments remains remarkably stable, with less than 3% difference between them.
- The research challenges common assumptions about “lurking” as a participation strategy and provides compelling evidence that course design factors significantly impact learning outcomes.
These findings reveal important patterns that can transform how we approach professional learning in global health contexts.

Beyond traditional completion metrics

For global health epidemiologists accustomed to face-to-face training with financial incentives and dedicated time away from work, these completion rates might initially appear appalling. In traditional capacity building programs, participants receive per diems, travel stipends, and paid time away from work. They are removed from their work environment, and their presence in the activities is often assumed to be evidence of both participation (often without any actual process metrics) and learning (with measurement often limited to “smile sheets” that measure sentiment or intent, not learning). Outcomes such as “completion” are rarely measured. Instead, attendance remains the key metric. In fact, completion rates are often confused with attendance. From this perspective, even the highest reported MOOC completion rate of 52.1% could be interpreted as a dismal failure.

However, this interpretation fundamentally misunderstands the different dynamics at play in digital learning environments. Unlike traditional training where external incentives and protected time create artificial conditions for participation, MOOCs operate in the reality of participants’ everyday professional lives. They typically do not require participants to stop work in order to learn, for example. The fact that up to half of enrollees in some courses complete them despite competing priorities, no financial incentives, and no dedicated work time represents remarkable commitment rather than failure.

What drives completion?

The accumulating evidence from MOOCs reveals three significant factors affecting completion:
1. Course length: Shorter courses consistently achieved higher completion rates.
2. Assessment type: Auto-grading showed better completion than peer assessment.
3. Start date: More recent courses demonstrated higher completion rates.
The critical engagement period occurs within the first two weeks, after which participant behavior stabilizes.

This insight aligns with what emerging networked learning approaches have demonstrated in practice.

Rather than judging digital learning by metrics designed for classroom settings, we must recognize that participation patterns may reflect authentic integration with professional practice.

The measure of success should not necessarily be focused solely on how many complete the formal course. Rather, we should be considering how learning connects to real-world problem-solving and contributes to sustained professional networks.

Moving beyond MOOCs: peer learning networks

The Geneva Learning Foundation’s learning-to-action model offers a distinctly different model from conventional MOOCs. While MOOCs typically deliver standardized content to individual learners who progress independently, the Foundation’s digital learning initiatives are fundamentally network-based and practice-oriented. Rather than focusing on content consumption, their approach creates structured environments where health professionals connect, collaborate, and co-create knowledge while addressing real challenges in their work.

These learning networks differ from MOOCs in several key ways:
1. Participants engage primarily with peers rather than pre-recorded content.
2. Learning is organized around actual workplace challenges rather than abstract concepts.
3. The experience builds sustainable professional relationships rather than one-time course completion.
4. Assessment occurs through peer review and real-world application rather than quizzes or assignments.
5. Structure is provided through facilitation and process rather than predetermined pathways.
The Foundation’s experience with over 60,000 health professionals across 137 countries demonstrates that when learning is connected to practice through networked approaches, different metrics of success emerge:
- Knowledge application: Practitioners implement solutions directly in their contexts
- Network formation: Sustainable learning relationships develop beyond formal “courses”
- Knowledge creation: Participants contribute to collective understanding
- System impact: Changes cascade through health systems
Implications for global health training and learning

For epidemiologists and health professionals designing learning initiatives, these findings suggest several strategic shifts:
1. Modular design: Create shorter, more connected learning units rather than lengthy courses.
2. Real-world integration: Link learning directly to participants’ practice contexts.
3. Peer engagement: Provide structured opportunities for health workers to learn from each other.
4. Network building: Focus on creating sustainable learning communities rather than isolated training events.
The future of professional learning, beyond completion rates

The research and practice point to a fundamental evolution in how we approach professional learning in global health. Rather than replicating traditional per diem-driven training models online, the most effective approaches harness the power of networks, enabling health professionals to learn continuously through structured peer interaction.

This perspective helps explain why seemingly low completion rates should not necessarily be viewed as failure. When digital learning is designed to create lasting networks of practice, knowledge emerges through collaborative action. Completion metrics therefore capture only a fraction of the impact.

For health systems facing complex challenges that include climate change, pandemic response, and health workforce shortages, this networked approach to learning offers a promising path forward—one that transforms how knowledge is created, shared, and applied to improve health outcomes globally.

Reference
- Jordan, K., 2015. Massive open online course completion rates revisited: Assessment, length and attrition. IRRODL 16. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v16i3.2112
Sculpture: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2025
March 18, 2025
#DigitalScholar Reboot Day 1
On Monday, July 3rd 2017, an expanded course team from three continents, supported by LSi’s Scholar Apprentices, began to trial a completely new approach to the development of digital learning.

This is the story of how we came to reboot the amazingly successful #DigitalScholar initiative offered by the Geneva Learning Foundation just one year ago.

Earlier this year, new #DigitalScholar course team member Iris Thiele Isip-Tan built the Learning Module (Scholar account required to view) for the 2016 #DigitalScholar course. This is more than just an archive.
- A learning module describes the sequence of events and includes all resources in a course.
- It includes all learning resources and activities, including the projects and their rubrics.
- In addition, the learning module provides guidance (metacognition) for the facilitator or course team.
- A learning module may also be used to support blended and self-guided learning.
- It can also be used to replicate and localize the course.
- Every element in a Learning Module can be pushed to a Community, where its members can respond to it as they collaborate and progress through dialogue and project development.
- The sequence and content of activities remain flexible, as they can be edited and remixed as soon as they are shared with a Community.
With the Scholar Approach, everything is about dialogue driven by activities (Community) and projects (Creator). The question is: “What does the learner get to do?” Unlike content-driven digital learning that requires front-loaded media-intensive resource development, we simply map out day-by-day the learners’ guided learning journey, structured by the Creator project rubric.

This affords us amazing flexibility to tailor activities in response to the behavior of the cohort. It is akin to agile development used in software development. It is a wonderfully creative and adaptive process. However, it also means that as we are building the course just-in-time, some learners lose the visibility that they expect as to what happens next.

The Learning Module resolves one dilemma that results from Scholar’s adaptive, agile learning development. If we had run a repeat of last year’s course, every participant would gain visibility of the entire set of activities.

And, in fact, this is what we were going to do with the second run of #DigitalScholar in 2017. The Learning Module is comprehensive. The first run of the course in 2016 was amazingly creative and productive. So it was tempting to just do a repeat.

However, we have learned so much in the past year about the design and execution of Scholar-based courses that we launched a reboot on Monday.

Google Hangout with the #DigitalScholar Team

With transmissive MOOCs or Moodle-based courses, the focus is on content collection and curation prior to the start of the course. The question is: “What content do we prepare for the learner to consume?” This means that no matter how dynamic, interactive, or gamified the course activities, the content remains fixed. Updating a resource is a momentous event. Double-loop learning becomes improbable as there is no way for learners or teachers to reshape content and activities without undue stress and effort. This is the content trap that George Siemens described with amazing acuity over a decade ago, and that scholars such as Bharat Anand have more recently written about.

So on Day 1 of the reboot, we disarmed the content trap. Can’t wait for Day 2.

Images: Flowers in my garden (July 2017). Personal collection.
July 6, 2017
Towers of technology

This came up in one of the Live Learning Moments in the first week of the Geneva Learning Foundation’s #DigitalScholar course:

This is for Reda: I’m very used to the Coursera/EdX kind of LMS and I’m finding it difficult to follow the course related postings and schedules on the digital learning community currently. I just feel that we are missing some structure.

This comment calls for reflection on the knowledge architecture of Scholar in relation to other technologies. In the first week of #Digital Scholar, we examined the architecture of the lecture and the classroom. I understand the yearning and the preference for a container view of knowledge, even though I believe the time has come to autopsy the discipline known as knowledge management. This view is reassuring because it is familiar. It mirrors the experience of mass industrial-age education that has shaped most of us. But does it correspond to the learning needs of today and tomorrow – and those that we are trying to address with #DigitalScholar by inventing a new method for the rapid, agile production of digital learning? Is learning a process or a product?

Scholar’s Activity Stream

What you are seeing in Scholar’s Activity Stream is learning as a process. It moves fast. There is no way to know everything. Learning to navigate becomes a key competency that you develop by doing. This is contrary to the views with which we were able to function in the past. But it models the fast-paced world we live, and it is not going to slow down. (George Siemens’s Knowing Knowledge remains for me the best explainer of what this means for learning.)

Now, I tend to be fairly agnostic about technology for learning. Basically, my conviction is that if you give a good learning designer a piece of string and an e-mail account, they can use these tools to enable an amazing learning journey. In fact, I have seen beautiful learning design compensate for the deficiencies of even the most broken, nightmarish corporate learning platforms. And I have friends and colleagues who have built amazing learning journeys on MOOC platforms or in Moodle. But to my mind they have had to work against the learning architecture of those platforms in order to achieve these.

In the MOOC platforms (and in many other similar learning management systems), the container view of learning is expressed by the curriculum. Sign in, and that is what you see: the content. Dialogue is buried in siloed discussion forums. If you are in one compartment, you may not see what is happening in the other. Furthermore, you may have a user profile but it is not really relevant to the course work. You exist only as an individual consumer, with an individual reward (the certificate). You may engage with peers in the forums, but that is mostly in response to specific discussion prompts. You consume content, and then get quizzed about your ability to recall it. Finally, when there is peer review, its purpose is to scale grading without needing tutors. You receive a grade, and then that’s it. There is no revision stage in which you are invited to think about the grade you received and what that means for your work.

In EdX, content transmission is center stage

In Moodle, you see the syllabus and, separate from that, a discussion forum. Dialogue is hidden from view, organized into one or more silos. Learners can submit work to the tutor or teacher, and then the assumption is that this teacher evaluates the work. This model requires more tutors for more learners. It is expensive to scale, and not very practical. Moodle replicates the classroom learning architecture. I understand that in the early days this may have been important to reassure professors exploring the use of technology that they could reproduce their behavior and keep the same habits of teaching. It is particularly ironic that, buried in Moodle’s documentation, you will find the claim that its design and development are guided by social constructionist pedagogy. That was a long time ago.

A linear sequence of assignments in Moodle

Philosophically, there is a distinction when thinking about what we mean by the democratization of education. Is it making learning technologies open source (Moodle)? Is it about opening access to content (MIT’s OpenCourseWare)? Or how about transmitting content from elite universities for consumption by learners who otherwise would have no access to it (EdX, Coursera)?

These are all important and significant. But there is one more, and it is fundamental. It is about recognizing the value of the experience and expertise of each learner. It is focused on dialogue between learners to foster network formation, that can happen around expert, curated knowledge but is equally likely to take place in relation to the learners’ own needs and context. It is about scaffolding the production of new knowledge that both individual and community can put to use. Individuals take responsibility for their own learning, but then learn from others as they are formulating feedback and inputs to their peers. Ultimately, it is about recognizing that every learner is also a teacher. And that teachers have much to learn from their learners – and this learning strengthens their role, rather than diminishes it. The expert’s value as convener, facilitator,and designer increases in a system in which the expertise of every contributor is recognized.

The most notable difference between Scholar and other platforms for learning is in the pedagogical model (Bill Cope’s and Mary Kalantzis’s 7 affordances of New Learning and Assessment) that underpins it.

Cope and Kalantzis 7 affordances of New Learning and assessment

Functions and features in Scholar are not dictated by a list of IT specifications but by this model. Everything in Scholar is about dialogue, not content. Content has its place: as an opportunity for discussion, reflection, and construction. Content is always shared in a network, whether that’s in the Community or in the more structured and private, safe space of Creator’s anonymous peer review.

For me, it was a Eureka moment in 2012 to realize how the use of Scholar would give me a new economy of effort to teach and learn. I had been struggling with trying to improve “click-through” e-learning modules that have limited efficacy and that people don’t finish even when it is mandatory. I have never finished a MOOC either. With Scholar, the opportunity to build something, especially if I can then use it in my work changed everything. I don’t know if your experience of this course will lead to the same epiphany. You may be attached to paticular tools and the ways of teaching and learning that they afford. Your practice or even your livelihood may depend on these. At the very least, I hope it will feed your thinking, learning, and doing on the tools and models you are using now, and how you are deploying technology to do new things in new ways, consistent with the needs and challenges of our times.

Image: skyscraperpage.com

July 19, 2016
MOOCs for teachers, then and now

In February, Daniel Seaton and his colleagues shared data about the very high level of teacher participation (28% identified as past or present teachers) and engagement (over four times more active in discussion forums than non-teachers) in a series of MITx MOOCs. Very interesting article when thinking of teachers as multipliers, mediators and facilitators of learning (and not just transmitters). Unlike earlier MOOC research that has been criticized for being ahistorical, Seaton shares the following example of pre-MOOC massive, open online education:

One of the earliest precursors to modern MOOCs targeted high school teachers in the United States. In 1958, a post-war interpretation of introductory physics called “Atomic-Age Physics” debuted at 6:30 a.m. on the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) Continental Classroom. Daily viewership was estimated at roughly 250,000 people, and over 300 institutions partnered to offer varying levels of accreditation for the course. Roughly 5,000 participants were certified in the first year. Teachers were estimated to be 1 in 8 of all certificate earners, indicating reach beyond the target demographic of high school teachers. Through its expansion of courses between 1958 and 1963, the Continental Classroom represented a bold approach in using technology to address national needs in education reform. In contrast, the current MOOC era has largely focused on student-centric issues like democratizing access.

Source: Seaton, D.T., Coleman, C., Daries, J., Chuang, I., 2015. Enrollment in MITx MOOCs: Are We Educating Educators? EduCause Review.

Ho, A.D., Chuang, I., Reich, J., Coleman, C.A., Whitehill, J., Northcutt, C.G., Williams, J.J., Hansen, J.D., Lopez, G., Petersen, R., 2015. HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online Courses Fall 2012-Summer 2014. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series.

Photo: Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951) (ORAU.com)

July 6, 2015
Scaling corporate learning

If you are interested in the strategic significance of educational technology for workplace learning, make sure that you do not miss the open, online symposium happening 18-19 June 2014.

The event is organized by George Siemens and hosted by Corp U. I will be facilitating sessions with the World Bank and OECD, as well as presenting on partnerships between corporate and non-profit learning leaders to scale up humanitarian education.

You’ll find more information on George Siemens’s post about the event and (later this week) on this blog.

Photo: Estádio Nacional de Brasilia. Imagery courtesy of Castro Mello Arquitetos.

June 16, 2014
Quick Q&A with George Siemens on corporate MOOCs
Here is an unedited chat with George Siemens about corporate MOOCs. He is preparing an open, online symposium on scaling up corporate learning, to be announced soon. The World Bank and OECD are two international organizations that will be contributing to the conversation. Here are some of the questions we briefly discussed:
- What is a “corporate MOOC” and why should organizations outside higher education care?
- By Big Data or Big Corporate standards, hundreds of thousands of learners (or customers) is not massive. Corporate spending on training is massive and growing. Why is this “ground zero” for scaling up corporate learning?
- How does educational technology change the learning function in organizations? What opportunities are being created?
- University engagement in MOOCs has led to public debate, taking place on the web, recorded by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and spilling over into the New York Times. So where is the debate on corporate MOOCs going to take place?
For those with MOOCish six-minute attention spans, you may watch this in two sittings. Apologies to George for the slow frame rate, which is why it looks like he is lip-syncing.
June 2, 2014
There is no scale

So, you are unhappy with a five percent completion rate. Hire tutors (lots of them, if it is massive). Try to get machines to tutor. Use learners as tutors (never mind the pedagogical affordances, you only care about scale and completion). Set up automated phone calls to remind people to turn in their homework. Ring the (behaviorist) bell.

Or not.

Google’s Coursebuilder team has an interesting take on completion rates. Let’s start by asking learners what they want to achieve. Then examine their behavior against their own expectations, rather than against fixed criteria. Surprise, surprise: take learner agency into consideration, and it turns out that most folks finish… what they wanted to.

Bill Cope has an interesting take on scale. He says: there is no scale. It is not only that face-to-face/online is a false dichotomy. The intimacy of learning can be recreated, irregardless of how many people are learning. Public schools break down an entire population of children into classes of twenty-five. The Red Cross and Red Crescent train 17 million people each year to do first aid, one workshop at a time. That makes the best aspects of those experiences ‘personable’. But depersonalization is not a function of scale. It is a function of learning environments that limit the affordances of learning and assessment.

In the United States, 26 million already have Type II diabetes. That is already massive problem on a national scale, part of the very wicked problem that makes non-communicable diseases the world’s bigger killer, responsible for over 36 million deaths every year. Prevent is a start-up that just raised 28 million U.S. dollars to deliver personalized health education on the very intimate issue of pre-diabetes, where a positive outcome equals a change in real-world behavior. In its model, each person is matched to a small (read: personable) group of no more than a dozen peers, and then works as part of this small group. The first published clinical study (apparently sponsored by the start-up, but due for publication in a scientific journal) indicates that the approach helps people lose weight in clinically-significant, long-term ways. The scale is in the opportunity, not in the experience of Prevent participants.

There is no scale.

May 7, 2014
Bill Gates on education, MOOCs, poverty and disease

This quote is not new. Given the increasing focus of MOOC debates on corporate MOOCs, it is interesting because bridging gaps in knowledge and skills is needed to address global health and poverty gaps. However, these twin strands of the Gates Foundation have, so far, been led by separate teams.

March 12, 2014
Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

I first heard her described as the “lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp”. It was completely ambiguous what that meant, but certainly sparked my curiosity. Barbara Moser-Mercer is a professor at the University of Geneva and a cognitive psychologist who has practiced and researched education in emergencies.

I finally caught up with her at the Second European MOOC Summit.

February 12, 2014
European MOOC Summit: What looks tasty – for organizations thinking about transforming how they learn

This is a quick overview of what I found of interest for international and non-governmental organizations in the program of the Second European MOOC Summit – possibly the largest and probably the most interesting MOOC-related event on the Old Continent – that opens tomorrow at Switzerland’s MIT-by-the-Lake, EPFL.

The first interesting thing I found in the program is that it includes an instructional session, titled “All you need to know about MOOCs”. Indeed, the more I meet and talk to people across a variety of international and non-governmental organizations, the more it is obvious that the so-called “hype” has remained circumscribed to a fairly narrow, academic circle – despite international media coverage and a few million registered users. That makes it both smart and relevant to offer a primer for anyone attending the conference who is discovering MOOCs, before they get plunged into the labyrinth of myth, paradox and possibility that is the future of education. Where the most current knowledge about MOOCs changes too rapidly for any one individual to keep up, it’s now possible to break down the basics – never mind that it might all be very different a year from now.

Now, my beef is that the raging MOOC debates have been focused almost exclusively on higher education, and been restricted to academic and edutech circles. That is changing – just look at George Siemens’s prediction that “corporate MOOCs will be the big trend of 2014”. I’m still not sure what “corporate MOOC” means but I’m assuming we’re talking about workplace learning, which meshes nicely with what I’ve been arguing all along: continual learning in organizations is a key driver for organizational performance, and only the affordances of technology can make this strategic (ie, help to realize the mission). This is true for the humanitarian sector (where I’ve worked for 21 years, and where I’ve just started LSi.io) but really extends to any mission-driven, knowledge-based organization, irregardless of whether profit is the motive.

First, some blunt (and possibly caricatural) ideas. Traditional learning and development is dead or dying, one face-to-face workshop (or one behaviorist, compliance click-through e-learning module) at a time. In the United States, the majority of higher education students are already “non-traditional”, ie they are working or looking for work, adults with family and professional lives alongside the need or wish to learn more. In Western Europe, unemployment for under-30s is structurally high, with many twenty-somethings spending years as “interns”, exploding the baby boomer model in which affordable university leads to job security. Learning looks like it’s going to be lifelong, as the EU keeps proclaiming, but not necessarily by choice… Last but not least, in the BRICs and other connected countries in what was known a long time ago as the Third World (sorry, nostalgia of sorts), educational opportunities and social mobility may not be uncoupled (yet), but most middle-class professionals see continuing education as a key to their development.

For international organizations and NGOs, the stakes are high. We know that traditional higher education produces young people without the practical skills, competencies, or critical thinking capacity to do the work of 21st century humanitarians. Worse, most of our own organizations’ training efforts are still premised on unscalable, expensive face-to-face training – training as if it were 1899. And from educational technology we have, so far, retained only the most reductive, behaviorist kinds of click-through e-learning, using it to transmit information in “pre-work” before the “real learning” can start in the classroom. (Of course, there is a more optimistic story to tell, given the number of brilliant humanitarians leading innovative efforts around learning – just drawing the broad, pessimistic strokes here).

These complex issues are most likely to be addressed at least implicitly in the Summit’s Business Track, where on Tuesday at 11h00 IMC’s Volker Zimmermann will moderate a session on MOOCs as “training instruments” for employees and partners. So that’s where I will go. Nevertheless, in the Experience Track, there is also a session on SPOCs (small, private, online courses – think Moodle on MOOCs) which could be useful to learning contexts where small-group work is a key to success.

I’m betting that Tuesday afternoon’s session on MOOCs for online external corporate training and communication will turn into a showcase for new companies trying to corner the corporate MOOC market. So off I will go to listen to Barbara Moser-Mercer’s talk on MOOCs in fragile contexts, which include refugee camps.

On Wednesday morning at 9h00, I will moderate a small-group discussion on MOOCs for international and nongovernmental organizations, hoping that MOOC providers and academics will attend in sufficient numbers to hear about how badly we need solutions to transform the way we do learning, education and training. IGO and NGO online learning pioneers Sheila Jagannathan from the World Bank Institute, Dominique Chantrel from UNCTAD, and Patrick Philipp from IRU will be sharing their early experiences. Let’s hope that the folks who build, sell, research and think about MOOCs will be listening.

Reda Sadki

Corrected on 11 February: the session on MOOCs for IGOs and NGOs starts at 9h00!

February 9, 2014