Singapore – Banking on its successful run in offering Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) will be offering at least three new online courses next year. One is a complexity science module that looks at interdisciplinary societal issues, and could be taught by several lecturers. Another new module offered is on environmental sustainability, and the third is on Confucian philosophy, which will start in the first half of next year.

Professor Kam Chan Hin, NTU senior associate provost in undergraduate education, shared these details yesterday on the sidelines of an education conference.

These courses, Prof Kam said, were chosen based on a mix of factors such as proposals made by faculty members.

Since NTU started its MOOCs in partnership with United States-based education provider Coursera about two years ago, the completion rate stands at around seven to eight per cent — higher than the 5 per cent average completion rate of Coursera modules.

“It attests to the quality of the course; people do it, they find it enjoyable to learn about it, it motivates them to finish,” said Prof Kam.

Over 200,000 people have participated in the current three NTU MOOCs — in symmetry, forensic science and e-commerce.

Non-NTU participants make up around 95 per cent of the enrolment, of which 4 per cent or 8,100 pay to receive a certificate of completion.

The university will continue to keep courses dynamic and engaging for participants, such as by incorporating videos in lectures.

For example, the Confucian philosophy module has videos filmed at the birth site of Confucius in China.

According to NTU, most of the overseas participants hail from the US and India.

The e-commerce course saw around 40 per cent of sign-ups come from Asia, 28 per cent from Europe, 19 per cent from North America, 7 per cent from South America and 5 per cent from Africa.

Moving forward, NTU is keen on analysing data gleaned from Coursera to enhance the delivery of its courses.

“When you have a massive scale of students… it becomes a very powerful experiment where you can see how to change your pedagogy or what affects your learner, you can do this when you have lots of data”, added Prof Kam.

The other local university offering Coursera courses is the National University of Singapore (NUS).

NUS offered six courses to the public, which have attracted about 180,000 students from around 200 countries.

It will be starting another four-part course series on workplace communication next year.