At a time when educational credentials are more important to individual and collective prosperity than ever before, students need online courses and degree programs that are effective, affordable, and grounded in public values. Proponents of postsecondary online education were buoyed by a 2009 meta-analysis sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education suggesting that student learning outcomes in online courses are superior to those in traditional face-to-face courses. online learning is a promising means to increase access and improve student progression through college, the Department of Education report does not provide evidence that fully online college courses produce superior learning outcomes.

Research shows that it is possible to …show more content…
In the recent past, MOOCs; i.e., Massive Open On-line Courses have become popular as a novel method of open learning. MOOCs can be classified roughly, into two groups, xMOOC, or eXtended MOOCs, such as Coursera, edX and MITx, and cMOOC, or Connectivist MOOC, such as Siemens CCK. Although they gathered a lot of attention initially, it has been found that they are just a large-scale replication of the orthodox learning management systems (LMS). They continue to remain as closed, structured, centralized, and teacher-oriented courses, which lay major emphasis on assignments and video …show more content…
Even though there is wide agreement that learning analytics can be highly valuable to the various MOOC stakeholders, application of those techniques onto MOOC datasets is however limited at present. Current implementations of the learning analytics in MOOCs are usually addressing facts like low completion rates, exploring learning patterns as well as supporting intervention. (Clow, 2013b; Mirriahi & Dawson, 2013).
A focus on the learner-perspectives in MOOCs has the capacity to expand learning analytics beyond such dogmatic assessments such as that of completion rate, personalization, assessment, recommendation, feedback, awareness, and, of course, introspection.

cMOOCs, as compared with xMOOCs pose certain challenges for the practice of these MOOC-Adaptation Analytics. This is largely because in cMOOCs, the learner participation is evolving, disjointed, scattered, and even varied (Clow, 2013b; McAulay et al., 2010) and a large number of these learning activities take place outside the platform spanning all the diverse learning environments. Working with cMOOCs would thus need a paradigm-shift towards analytics on more demanding data sets