Stories

Tag: online learning

  • Online learning completion rates in context: Rethinking success in digital learning networks

    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

    Sculpture: The Geneva Learning Foundation Collection © 2025

  • Which is better for global health: online, blended, or face-to-face learning?

    Which is better for global health: online, blended, or face-to-face learning?

    Question 1. Does supplementing face-to-face instruction with online instruction enhance learning?

    No. Positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. (It is more likely that positive effects are due to people doing more work in blended learning, once online and then again in a physical space.)

    This is the conclusion of the U.S. Department of Education’s “Evaluation of evidence-based practices in online learning: a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies” in September 2010. You can find the full document here.

    Question 2. Is the final academic performance of students in distance learning programs better than that of those enrolled in traditional FTF programs, in the last twenty-year period?

    Yes. Distance learning results in increasingly better learning outcomes since 1991 – when learning technologies to support distance learning were far more rudimentary than they are now.

    This is the meta-analysis done by Mickey Shachar and Yoram Nuemann reviewing twenty years of research on the academic performance differences between traditional and distance learning: summative meta-analysis and trend examination in the Merlot Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. Vol 6, No. 2, June 2010.

    A long time ago, I asked Bill Cope what the evidence says about the superiority of online learning over blended and face-to-face. My experience had already consistently been that you could achieve so much more with the confines and constraints of physical space removed.

    Of course, it is complicated. But Bill pointed me to the two meta-analyses published in 2010 that provided fair and definitive evidence to answer two questions. Yet, in the field of global health, the underlying assumption of funders and technical partners remains that there is no better way to learn than by flying bodies and materials at high cost. This is scientifically and morally wrong, does not scale, and has created a per diem economy of perverse incentives. It is wrong even if it is easy to understand why international trainers and trainees both express a preference for the least effective, low volume, high cost approach to learning.

    Image: Online learning networks. Personal collection generated by Mindjourney.

  • Learning habits

    Learning habits

    What are the learning habits that we perform on a regular basis to stay current? As professionals, we organize our personal learning habits in different ways that reflect our interests, personalities, and career paths. We rely on a variety of information sources, engage in reading, attend seminars and conferences, or take MOOCs or other online courses. And, of course, we connect with others. The content we seek may be directly related to our work – or conversely we may seek to acquire knowledge outside our immediate realm and field of vision.

    Some or if not most of our reading of work-related content takes place outside of work, even though some of us may choose to cordon off our private lives and succeed in doing so at least some of the time.

    We use these information sources in different ways, striving to question what we learn, sorting and organizing what we gather.  We recognize the deeply personal nature and diversity of these learning habits. Informal learning is not limited to the context of work. We may mobilize modes of inquiry or specific values to approach a problem in work, drawing on our personal lives, faith or culture, or family contexts.

    Each of us organizes such mostly informal, continuous learning in different ways. Making this strategic is not about prescribing best practice, but about recognizing the value of such practices. Our ability to quickly make sense of new knowledge – and to make it a habit – may be more important than the knowledge itself.

    Photo: 10 habits (Audrey Low/flickr.com)

  • Badges for online learning: gimmick or game-changer?

    As I’ve been thinking about building a MOOC for the 13.1 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers, I’ve become increasingly interested in connectivism. One of the platforms I’ve discovered is called P2PU (“Peer To Peer University”), which draws heavily on connectivist ideas.

    Surprise: on P2PU there is a debate raging on about badges, of all things. I initially scoffed. I’ve seen badges on Khan Academy and have read that they are very popular with learners, but did not really seriously consider these badges to be anything more than gimmicks.

    It turns out that badges are serious learning tools, and that makes sense from a connectivist perspective. A white paper from the Mozilla Foundation summarizes why and how, drawing on an earlier paper from P2PU’s co-founder Philipp Schmidt.

    George Siemens’s (2005) connectivism theory of learning is said to go “beyond traditional theories of learning (such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism) to include technology as a core element”. So badges in this theory would use technology itself ot make connections between learners.

    First, it is claimed that badges can capture and translate learning across contexts, with more granularity (detail) than degrees or cumulative grades, with a badge for each specific skill or quality — and showing off progression over time as badges accumulate (like medals pinned to a soldier’s chest or a general’s stripes). Therefore badges could signal achievement and be matched to specific job requirements.

    Second, badges are meant to encourage and motivate “participation and learning outcomes”. They are feedback mechanism — both gateway and signpost — on a learning path, ie showing what can be learned and when, as in Khan Academy’s Google-style map going from basic addition to multivariate calculus. In addition, they can also cover or highlight informal or soft skills of the kind that formal education doesn’t account for. And, in fact, making new badges available can be done in real time, fast enough to keep up with the pace of the fastest-changing fields (like IT or web development).

    Third, badges are thought to formalize and enhance social connections, as they can be considered a mechanism to promote identity and reputation within a learning community. By doing so, badges may in fact foster community, bringing together peers to formalize teams or communities of practice.

    There’s quite a bit of enthusiasm online for badges as successors to pre-digital forms of accreditation and authority, like university diplomas and CVs. For example, Jacy Hood, director of College Open Textbooks, declared in a blog comment:  ”We are optimistic that Mozilla Badges will become the new international educational currency/credentials and that traditional education institutions will recognize, accept, and award these badges.”

    Edutech blogger Mitchel Resnick explains that he is an increasingly lone voice to express skepticism about badges: 

    I worry that students will focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges – the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game. Simply engaging students is not enough. They need to be engaged for the right reasons.

    For Resnick, it is the perception of a badge as a reward that throws back to behaviorist thinking: 

    When we develop educational technologies and activities in my research group, we explicitly try to avoid anything that might be perceived as a reward – what Alfie Kohn characterizes as “Do this and you’ll get that.” Instead, we are constantly looking for ways to help young people build on their own interests, and providing them with opportunities to take on new roles. 

    However, it really depents on the “Do this” component: what is the learner being asked to do? If it can be performed without engagement, then Resnick may be right. This implies that the reward component may not be the sole function of the badge itself but will depend on the activities required to obtain it.

    I started writing this as a badge skeptic. Yet, I’m already starting to think of additional benefits: in a visual online world, badges are visual indicators, rather than text on a screen. They can therefore mobilize visual symbols to trigger our cultural and emotional sensibilities, without requiring reading effort on our part. By looking a badge, we can recognize its shape, colors and design and identify its meaning. This is pretty powerful stuff for learning.

    What do you think?

  • Maybe old learning isn’t so bad, after all?

    When I first saw Professor Cope’s photos of a 1983 elementary school classroom, I scoffed. It was so obvious that the “communications and knowledge architecture” was one-way, focused on rote learning and rewarding good behavior which involved staying safely “inside the box”. How easy to critique, deconstructing all of the ways in which this particular “banking” form of education was unlikely to intentionally “deposit” anything that might actually be useful to the future lives of these school children. How awful, I thought, and how at odds with everything I try to put into practice with respect to my own professional role. Today’s MOOCs and flipped classrooms, with their objectives of making active knowledge-making ubiquitous, make 1983 look like the Dark Ages of education.

    And yet. And yet this classroom very closely resembles the ones in which I grew up, with 5th grade in 1980 as a reference point. And I was one of the kids for whom it was an enjoyable experience. I thrived in that environment. I wanted to sponge up the facts and figures, and was proud to raise my hand, hoping the teacher would pick me. Group work simply wasn’t as much fun or rewarding as the individual recognition and praise from the teacher. It’s only when I jog my 42-year-old brain to recall what made me enjoy school so much that I realize it was the interaction, the creativity, and the serendipity. But the scaffolding was sturdy and reassuring precisely because it was so rigid and didactic.

    The same with university. In my professional life, I proclaim my belief that the time for “post-campus education” has arrived. Speaking to a group of young interns, I explained recently that they could expect that their life-long learning had only just begun, and that by abandoning the oh-so-twentieth-century sequence in which you complete your degree and then go to work, they could more actively shape their future careers.

    And yet. I was a first-generation college student, going to a university in the U.S. when both my parents never made it past elementary school. My father was put into an orphanage. My mother was denied the education she strived for when her school was closed by the French colonial forces when the Algerian Revolution started. The university campus was for me the site of life-changing experiences.

    Today I am also the father of three boys. Nassim, my six-year-old, learned reading, writing and arithmetic this year. When it comes to his education, my approach is far-removed from cutting-edge education. I make him read and re-read texts, do and redo addition and subtraction exercises, drilling it in and checking constantly to see if it’s sunk in yet. Rewards are limited or non-existent with me. Sometimes he resists, complaining about the repetition or that it’s “too hard”. But he also seems to genuinely enjoy completing the exercises. I do this because I’m concerned that his public school teacher is going to be too “slack”, because he goes to school in a poor neighborhood in Paris where many of the kids face tough life circumstances, have parents who do not know how to read and write, and are considered by many (including teachers) to be destined for vocational training leading straight to unemployment. Especially if they are of Arab or African descent.

    So, what to do with such blatant contradictions between my professed interest in “new learning” and my personal experience? I believe this contradiction can be productive, meaning that I try to mobilize it to understand why colleagues and other interlocutors express skepticism about innovation in learning, whether explicitly or implicitly. And, yes, I’m also trying to rethink how I work with my sons after school. The world is changing. If we want learning to be supportive, participatory, inspiring, motivating, flexible… it’s not (only) because that will make learning a more pleasurable experience. It is because this is how our children (or those of others, for those to whom parents have delegated mass public education) will get the chance to develop the knowledge and skills they will need to not only survive but thrive — in the online classrooms before they learn the hard way, IRL.