More than 60.000 people were enrolled in three online courses on different subjects in 2015. MOOCs are highly coveted and the University is about to expand the project.
Access to education has always been highly contested. Medieval university solely opened their doors for privileged, wealthy, male students. Exclusion of minority groups and women continued until the 19th century. Academic Online Courses without restriction on participation portray the complete opposite.
Today, formally most education institutions are open to everyone. Nevertheless, we see trends of marginalisation of certain groups. Hence, it still seems like a quite revolutionary idea to open up education for everyone.
Somewhat along those lines must have been the incentive to start the first Massive Open Online Course in 2008. So called “MOOCs” are educational courses, provided online and have no restriction on participation whatsoever.
But is this form of online learning truly about to herald a new era? Seven years after its inauguration the resume is rather modest. Even though participation rates are high, the number of those actually finishing the courses is normally below 1%.
Usually, subscribers represent the homogenous background one expects to find when waling down the aisle of an average university and often already hold an academic degree. Not surprisingly, MOOCs did not lead to a full re-invention of the higher education sector.
After grand names such as Harvard, Yale and other well-known higher education institutions, Lund University offered its first MOOC in 2015.
So far, three courses on different subjects were offered and the response has been mainly positive. More than 60.000 people enrolled for the courses, though numbers are decreasing a lot when looking at who actually visited the course page, took part in the tasks and the number of graduates.
So, does this investment truly pay off? Martia Ljungqvist from Lund University says yes.
According to her, MOOCs can contribute to develop better skills for online teaching that full-time students of the University consequently also benefit from. MOOCs can also be used in other courses and a striking argument for rather large investment is, that once the course is developed, the running of it does not cost anything.
The University seems to be very realistic about their goals when it comes to MOOCs. A novel course on academic writing in English and Swedish is planned for the upcoming year and is mainly targeted at people who are already studying in Lund and prosperous students.
“We can offer education for the whole world. That’s nice. But it also has to give something back to our students”, says the Project Manager for the MOOC-project Ljungqvist.
