Author Archives: Tim van der Zee

Skeptical scientist. I study how people learn from educational videos in open online courses, and how we can help them learn better. PhD student at Leiden University (the Netherlands), but currently a visiting scholar at MIT and UMass Lowell. You can follow me on Twitter: @Research_Tim and read my blog at www.timvanderzee.com

Open online education: Research findings and methodological challenges

With a reliable internet connection comes access to the enormous World Wide Web. Being so large, we rely on tools like Google to search and filter all this information. Additional filters can be found in sites like Wikipedia, offering a library style access to curated knowledge, but it too is enormous. In more recent years, open online courses has rapidly become a highly popular method of gaining easy access to curated, high quality, as well as pre-packaged knowledge. A particularly popular variety is the Massive Open Online Course, or MOOC, which are found on platforms like Coursera and edX. The promise – global and free access to high quality education – has often been applauded. Some have heralded the age of the MOOC as the death of campus based teaching. Others are more critical, often citing the high drop-out rates as a sign of failure, or argue that MOOCs do not or cannot foster ‘real’ learning (e.g., Zemsky, 2014; Pope, 2014). Continue reading

Tim van der Zee

Skeptical scientist. I study how people learn from educational videos in open online courses, and how we can help them learn better. PhD student at Leiden University (the Netherlands), but currently a visiting scholar at MIT and UMass Lowell. You can follow me on Twitter: @Research_Tim and read my blog at www.timvanderzee.com

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