How to be a successful learner in a MOOC

MOOCs (massive open online courses) have high dropout rates. It could well be that learners drop out of MOOCs because the content isn't relevant, the teacher is boring, the course is too hard, etc, but in this "age of MOOCs" it's perhaps good to be realistic and accept that teachers can't be responsible for every single student. Whether a MOOC has 100 learners or 100,000, the teacher is not going to be able to attend to learners individually. And who is going to take the biggest hit as a result of this?

Unprepared learners.

Troubleshooting a slow Moodle site at an African university

As part of my work for INASP I've been in touch with a few people at a major open university in Africa to set up an online course on their Moodle site.

But there was one obstacle: their Moodle site was really slow.

Sitting far away in Mumbai with only teacher-level access to their site, I could not tinker with the front-end administrator settings and certainly not the server where their site is hosted. All I could do was count the seconds it took to load a page.