MOOCs

University of Maryland (UMD) is a global leader in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), achieving some of the highest enrollment rates in courses offered by Coursera and edX.

UMD’s scores of MOOCs have been honored extensively, with many topping international Top 10 MOOC lists. UMD’s MicroMasters MBA, and MOOC specializations in cybersecurity, agile project management, entrepreneurship, product management, survey data analytics, and resume writing and job interviewing in English for non-native speakers have provided unprecedented exposure to UMD expertise, with more than 2 million enrolled learners.

UMD's MOOC program goals are to drive positive experiences for learners worldwide to experience quality offerings by our instructors.

UMD's MOOCs have received positive reviews. Students from around the world have thanked course instructors for helping them to achieve their learning objectives. One learner left the workforce a decade ago to start a family. Recently, she wrote to share that UMD's Cybersecurity courses helped her to re-enter the workforce through obtaining a job in the field.

These courses are engaging our faculty in creative use of technology, not only to scale up student learning, but also to analyze teaching methods and resulting learning outcomes to improve course materials and pedagogy. These improvements in teaching methods and materials are then being used by our instructors in our for-credit classes. When the classroom is "flipped", some of the content is learned outside of class with MOOC material, and class time can then be used for more active, engaging and challenging work. The result is that MOOCs are improving our face-to-face classes as well as our online offerings.

While most learners take MOOCs for free, they also have the option of paying a small fee for the full course experience including assessments and, in some cases, a MOOC certificate. A portion of those fees comes back to UMD to run the MOOC program and to support the instructors in developing and running the courses. Finally, we are also finding success in converting students who take our MOOCs to become paying UMD students, especially for our online professional graduate programs.

Hosting an MOOCs Course

We offer continuous opportunities campus-wide to develop new MOOCs. We plan on adding new courses annually funded by the Provost’s Office through this program with the goal of expanding on the successes described above. Campus faculty and their units are eligible to apply.

There are numerous resources available to understand the process of creating a MOOC. If you would like more information about what it takes to develop a course using the MOOC platforms, see Course Proposal & Approval Process, contact our existing MOOC instructors, or contact the MOOCs unit at moocs@umd.edu.