Update on Spring 2013 MOOC Enrollment, Participant Data for TechniCity

From Jennifer Evans-Cowley, who is co-teaching the TechniCity class with UAP's Tom Sanchez:

"Hi all,

Many of you offered notes of encouragement when Tom Sanchez (Virginia Tech) and I announced our planned Massive Open Online Course TechniCity (http://www.coursera.org/course/techcity) and is the equivalent of a 3-credit hour course we teach at our home universities. We are pleased to let you know that well over 7,000 people have signed up for this free four week course (enrolling an average of 800 people per week). I’m sure a handful of these are you and your students.

We will be including a number of guest speakers and interestingly while we had agreement from two professors from two different universities who wanted to provide a lecture, their universities told them that could not participate. I personally found this to be quite interesting that a university would limit a professor’s ability to provide a guest lecture in a class. I will note that other university’s administrations have viewed this activity quite favorably.

We thought we’d share a little about the profile of the participants.

·        Most interesting to me is that 30% of the participants plan to take this course via their mobile device. Certainly cause for us to pause and give deep consideration to how to effectively deliver and engage via the small screen.

·         Attached is a map of the 13% of participants that have provided their location. As you can see this is truly a global course with participants from more than 60 different countries.

• Our participants are well educated with 67% already hold a degree and 25% currently enrolled in college. 25% hold a degree or significant work experience in city planning, while 27% are new to this field
• 75% are taking the course because they believe it will be helpful to their career
• 51% plan to use this course as a credential on their resume
• For 43% this is their first massive open online course

We welcome all comers. We figure if we can teach to 7,000 we can teach to 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Evans-Cowley, PhD

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Administration

College of Engineering

The Ohio State University"