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.

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