Dive Brief:
- The University of Wisconsin at Madison has evaluated its first round of massive open online courses and plans to offer a new and improved version in January.
- One main difference in the new MOOCs will be a “greatest hits” approach to teaching, focusing on the highlights of the face-to-face counterpart rather than trying to duplicate that version of the course, Insider Higher Ed reports.
- Six four-week courses are planned, differing from the six- to eight-week length of the university's first MOOCs.
Dive Insight:
The first round of MOOCs at the university had a 3.2% completion rate, which spurred the school to make changes — though that percentage wasn’t necessarily out of line with the completion rate of other MOOCs. One reason for shortening the January courses is the fact that participation in the first round of MOOCs, which signed up the 135,602 people to start, declined considerably after four weeks. UW-Madison is also planning for the new MOOCs to focus more on topics that will interest Wisconsin residents, because the first round had 95% of the students enrolled from outside the state.
