MOOC 🌈

Hello everybody :)

Today I want to talk about interesting platform ─ MOOC.

What is MOOC?
MOOC (a massive open online course) - an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. 


If you are considering a MOOC for yourself or your organization, you’ll first need to determine which tool you will use to build the course. The following is an assessment of five popular free MOOC (and MOOC-like) platforms.

Canvas.net / Coursera.org / edX.org all this sites were created to help us in our education. 

This sites contain all kind of lections, which you can learn online in any time you want. You just should to choose a category you want to study and every lection will open to you. But not all lections are free!

CANVAS

Canvas Network offers open, online courses taught by educators everywhere. It provides a place and platform where teachers, students, and institutions worldwide can connect and chart their own course for personal growth, professional development, and academic inquiry.

What are the advantages to using Canvas for an LMS?

For Faculty

• Clean interface - Canvas's straightforward, simple architecture lets instructor content be the focus.
• Easier building experience - Canvas is easy to navigate, so instructors can build courses easily and consistently.
• SpeedGrader - This tool makes grading assignments much easier, enabling instructors to give students more thorough and efficient feedback.

For Students

• Mobile app - 50 percent of student respondents indicated they used a mobile device to access Canvas, and that the ability to use Canvas on a smartphone or tablet was a significant advantage.
• Grades - Students can include hypothetical grades and view their final grade percentage throughout the term.
• Simplified collaboration - Students can take a proactive approach to group work, sharing documents and hosting discussions all within the LMS.
• Calendar - This tool helps students stay organized, displaying assignments and due dates across all active courses.

COURSERA

Coursera is an online learning platform to provide high quality education.

Coursera offers courses, specializations, and degrees. Over the past years, Coursera has had tie-ups with a large  number of the best universities around the world.

Coursera Advantages:

Extremely diverse catalog. You can find more topics in more areas than anywhere else. Besides the high-demand business and computer science courses, they also have many many arts, humanities, psychology, self-developments courses.

Extremely flexible deadline. They made deadlines so flexible it is impossible to fail. 

Very easy to use forums, hence, discussions are quite active. The forum is one of the best feature of their platform. It beats edX by a landslide in this respect.

Peer review system:  their peer reviewed assignment is more extensive, and easier to use than edX, allowing them to have more projects as part of the courses.

Strong identity verification mechanism: the webcam photo ID verification   the typing pattern is quite strong. 

They can monetize: being a for-profit, they can monetize, and hence, have more potential of expanding and offering more courses.

Coursera drawbacks:

Not completely free: even though there are still many many free courses on Coursera, most of the high-demand courses are now "audit-only": a mode where non-payers don't have access to graded assessments. 

Quizzes are too lenient: quizzes have unlimited trials. Basically, this tempts people to trial and error to get the quiz answer right, instead of working through it properly. Thus, skill validation is quite doubtful.

EdX

Pros

A really good interface. It's clean, simple and does the job. Really helps you focus and learn more.

Superb resources for science students. It has profound resources for the same. From MIT's courses on Python to learning molecular biology, and chemistry and whatnot, their science courses are worth keeping an eye out for. 

Cons

Discussions aren't as informative and worth reading about like Coursera. Unless you want to see multiple doubts about the same thing.

More resources on topics beside science could help more, as the content is less compared to Coursera.

I hope that this information has been useful to you :)