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MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic
One side-effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been increased enrollment in online classes. The paper explores the surge in activity from March through June 2020 in two massive open online classes (MOOCs) on Astronomy, offered by Coursera and Udemy. The increase in enrollment in both classes was an or...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8558731/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34746753 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100177 |
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author | Impey, Chris Formanek, Martin |
author_facet | Impey, Chris Formanek, Martin |
author_sort | Impey, Chris |
collection | PubMed |
description | One side-effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been increased enrollment in online classes. The paper explores the surge in activity from March through June 2020 in two massive open online classes (MOOCs) on Astronomy, offered by Coursera and Udemy. The increase in enrollment in both classes was an order of magnitude over the similar time span in previous years. Learners enrolling during the pandemic were more likely to be younger than thirty and less likely to have advanced degrees. A majority were full-time undergraduate students, and relatively few were professionals working in technical fields. The largest number of new students were from India and overall, the biggest surge in enrollment came from people in developing countries, particularly in Asia. Those who enrolled during the pandemic were more likely to take the course to get a certificate or to further their career goals than because they had intrinsic interest in the subject. Social motivations were important, particularly among full-time students in the course. These results, albeit limited to MOOCs in astronomy, suggest that new audiences have been turning to online classes during the pandemic for gaining credentials or advancing their professional skills. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8558731 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-85587312021-11-01 MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic Impey, Chris Formanek, Martin Soc Sci Humanit Open Article One side-effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has been increased enrollment in online classes. The paper explores the surge in activity from March through June 2020 in two massive open online classes (MOOCs) on Astronomy, offered by Coursera and Udemy. The increase in enrollment in both classes was an order of magnitude over the similar time span in previous years. Learners enrolling during the pandemic were more likely to be younger than thirty and less likely to have advanced degrees. A majority were full-time undergraduate students, and relatively few were professionals working in technical fields. The largest number of new students were from India and overall, the biggest surge in enrollment came from people in developing countries, particularly in Asia. Those who enrolled during the pandemic were more likely to take the course to get a certificate or to further their career goals than because they had intrinsic interest in the subject. Social motivations were important, particularly among full-time students in the course. These results, albeit limited to MOOCs in astronomy, suggest that new audiences have been turning to online classes during the pandemic for gaining credentials or advancing their professional skills. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2021 2021-06-19 /pmc/articles/PMC8558731/ /pubmed/34746753 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100177 Text en © 2021 The Authors Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Impey, Chris Formanek, Martin MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic |
title | MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_full | MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_fullStr | MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_full_unstemmed | MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_short | MOOCS and 100 Days of COVID: Enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic |
title_sort | moocs and 100 days of covid: enrollment surges in massive open online astronomy classes during the coronavirus pandemic |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8558731/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34746753 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100177 |
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