If you follow me on twitter you must have seen my tweets from the edX global forum in Washington DC from 8th Nov till the 10th. As an early adopter of MOOC, we have been extremely happy with our decision to get into MOOCs as well as with the success of our MOOCs. Measure of success is clearly in the eyes of the beholder. Those who are non-believers will point to the very poor completion rates (compared to the initial registration). Those of us who believe that MOOCs have a place in Higher Education will point to a whole list of other things – those who complete our MOOCs are still several multiples of face to face class size, our faculty are engaging with the global audience to help them learn the “liberal arts” way, they are learning from teaching in a new platform to a global audience for the benefit of the students in face to face classes, our students say that the MOOCs help them as a valuable additional resource to their face to face class etc. We are not going to settle this debate any time soon, so let us move on.

I thoroughly enjoyed the meeting. The presentations and panels were impressive. The networking was excellent. I got to meet a lot of people from Europe, some from Jordan, a few from Japan. I was fascinated to meet a young man from Sri Lanka who supports MOOCs from Kyoto University. Of course, he does not speak Japanese and I found out that he is a vegetarian. Talk about an outlier! It is also fair to say that he would be one of the rare Sinhalese Vegetarian.

One of the topics that created some buzz was “credit for MOOCs”. As one can imagine, this is an extremely difficult topic for everyone, especially for small residential liberal arts colleges. Many learners look at MOOCs as additional resources to their face to face class. We heard how 90% of the MIT students have taken a MOOC (but I believe not all complete). These types of engagements are comparable to someone auditing a face to face class. Though they don’t really “count” as completions, they are very important. The primary reason why certain group of learners don’t complete has to do with the fact that there is currently no tangible benefit in return for the time and effort needed to complete a MOOC along with all the assessments. Of course, learning is the greatest benefit, but for this group, credentials are of paramount importance! Verified certificates are a step in the right direction, but we need other credentialing in order to get more and stronger engagement.

The partnership between Arizona State University on Global Freshman Academy, which allows first year students to complete courses online for a fraction of the cost of taking a face to face class and the MIT Micromasters program are two early examples of MOOCs for credit. The idea is that make the content available as a MOOC for the benefit of the larger global audience while making a parallel track for credit that requires the learners to go through assessments differently. Virtual proctoring is used to accomplish this. Critics have a lot of questions about the authenticity of such methods, but this method has been in use by many institutions that have been offering “for credit” online courses. I got the sense that depending on the success of these, there will be other takers. During one of our meetings, concerns about the campus culture and a lack of clarity to the financial model of this was brought up as possible deterrents in certain institutions. At least one person privately told me “We understand the campus culture issues, but we are really not waiting!”

We heard from several attendees from Europe about how they are moving forward in interesting ways. In a couple of countries the government was beginning to take the lead on the topic of credentialing through MOOCs but, the higher eds have gotten involved and are taking the lead (for the obvious reason of making sure that the government doesn’t do this for them!) In several instances we heard how the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) makes it easy to deal with both developing consistent policies across Europe for these types of issues as well as the mechanics and execution of transfer of credits when the MOOC credentialing issues have been resolved.

I strongly advise that you read “A growing MOOC movement highlights ECTS”  and review the report cited there “Institutional MOOC strategies in Europe”  to get a sense of the differences in the way Europe views credit for MOOCs vs the US. You can also see this post to understand how ECTS has been granting credits for MOOCs since 2013!

Finally, I heard from a couple of folks from another reputable institution, where a student with a letter grade of C or higher can request to improve his/her grade by taking an authorized MOOC online and taking an assessment to show proficiency. So, you get the point, EU is on to something interesting here.

For further reaction from me about the forum, please check out my unvarnished tweets and promise to retweet them, because I need to boost up my Klout score.