How Meetups Can Improve Your MOOC Experience

Many students

 find it as a very useful way to make their learning a lifelong process. MOOCs provide students with lectures by the best professors from around the world. But one of the biggest barriers about MOOCs is that many of the students aren’t completing the courses they’ve enrolled for. There are several reasons behind student dropouts in MOOCs. Less interest, loneliness and absence of effectiveness of MOOCs are the main causes of MOOC dropout. Recently, dropout rates have been significantly reduced because of the sincere efforts made by MOOC hosting sites, professors and students. Meetups have become one of the best solutions to improve MOOC experience. In this article, we let you know how Meetups can improve the MOOC experience.

What is Meetup!

The concept behind a Meetup is to form a community and to discuss issues or problems regarding a topic or anything in their courses with other like-minded people. This idea makes MOOCs a more authentic form of learning for sure.

MOOC Meetups connect tech workers and entrepreneurs:

Most of the people taking MOOC courses are tech lovers who either work with startups, IT and related fields or want to work in these fields. MOOC Meetups form a network and make those students and entrepreneurs exchange their ideas to find innovations.

MOOC Meetups relieves the student from “isolation”:

The main ongoing criticism which suffers online courses is “Isolation”. A learner feels alone while taking a course and ends up as a dropout. But a Meetup makes all students feel excited to discuss what they are learning in a course. Meetup can take place online via social networks or offline via meetings.

The above mentioned are the basic functions of a MOOC Meetup. All we need is a platform to start, and organize a Meetup: we will let you know about a platform that helps you find or start a Meetup.

Meetup:

Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups that makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 9,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities. Meetup’s mission is to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes in a great fact that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference. 

The Meetup platform helps many websites that host MOOCs in making the learners’ MOOC experience effective. Websites namely Coursera, Udacity, etc. are already conducting MOOC Meetups by using this platform. Let’s learn more about them.

Coursera MOOC Meetups:

Coursera has 30,825 Courserians in 2,651 cities from around the world. They have formed communities in most of these cities to make their MOOC experience more interesting. The vision is to connect the world with a great education and let people learn without limits.

Twitter: @coursera Facebook: Coursera

Udacity MOOC Meetups:

Udacity has 4,508 Udacians in 573 cities from around the world. Udacity students get together to study, discuss, hang out, exchange ideas, invent the next big thing, clear doubts, etc.

Twitter: @udacity Facebook: Udacity email: [email protected]

Few More Benefits of Meetups:

Meetups not only help in beating the isolation but also provide natural places for monitoring and proctoring of MOOC courses and exams.

MOOC-participating institutions can go a step closer to granting college credit for the courses.

Learners can be teamed up to work on physical projects.

MOOC Meet–up groups small batches of self–directed interested learners.

Instead of just listening and analyzing a topic alone, a meet-up makes learning much more effective by experimenting, questioning and discussing with others.

MOOC Meet-up creates a higher quality, more personalized and specialized learning environment.

We hope this information is useful for you to know how Meet-up improves MOOC experiences. Meetup is one of the best solutions to increase the social aspect and reduce the MOOC dropouts. 

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