Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.
— Shirkey, 2012
Compared to formal learning, there tends to be much higher rates of drop-out, and steeply unequal patterns of participation. This is probably an almost-inevitable consequence of any open, online activity. [...] The phenomenon shows that MOOCs alone cannot replace degrees or most other formal qualifications.
— Clow, 2013
Example trajectory: $[T, T, T, T, T, B, A, A, A]$
It was surprising to see a low number of proposals that had planned to make use of the techniques and methods of learning analytic and educational data mining (LA/EDM).
[...] Our results indicate that the MRI review panel expressed a strong preference towards the use of the LA/EDM methods.
— Gašević, Kovanović, Joksimović & Siemens, 2014
Enrolled learners in a MOOC are potentially all over the world and therefore are likely to have different cultural and personal sensitiveness about privacy issues. [...] Learners might feel violated if they saw their posts de-contextualized and highlighted in a publication.
— Esposito, 2012
It does not require trillions of event logs to demonstrate that effort is correlated with achievement. [...] The next generation of MOOC research needs to adopt a wider range of research designs with greater attention to causal factors promoting student learning.
— Reich, 2015