Geoscience Online Education: Present and future

On the Cutting Edge 2014Jonathan Tomkin, University of Illinois

Total and Online Enrollment - USA (2002 – 2010)

Allen and Seaman (2011)

Online Enrollment as % Total Enrollment (2002 - 2010)

Allen and Seaman (2011)

Does it work? Academic Leaders Opinion

Allen and Seaman (2011)

Current growth in geoscience education is in online courses and programs.

What about MOOCs?

https://www.coursera.com/https://www.udacity.com/https://www.edx.org/

https://class.coursera.org/sustain-2012-001/class/index

We bundle research (generates prestige – signal!), campus experience, etc with the degree. Other bundlers? Newspapers (ads paid for reporting)…

On-campus credit 0.16 K

On-campus credit 0.16 KMOOC “credit” 5 K

On-campus credit 0.16 KMOOC “credit” 5 KMOOC enrollees 70K

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 80

1000

2000

3000 A forum A lec-tures A quiz

Week

Num

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f stu

dent

s

active3985

enrolled

MOOC Participation 10209

809599

92