Interview with MoocLab.club's CEO Carolyn McIntyre

Ramón Talavera Franco
@Ratafra

MoocLab.club is a Forum and Community Website for Consumers and Providers of MOOCs and Online Learning to meet, share, debate and learn. The site aims to provide its users with a centralised space to interact with peers around a common theme: E-learning. Through the forums, you can ask for or give advice, debate on topical issues, find or add relevant information and keep up to date with news and insights relating to MOOCs and Online Learning.

Watch this three minutes picks from the interview

MoocLab from Ramon Talavera on Vimeo.

1. How (did you/somebody else) come up with the idea to create MoocLab?
My brother is Charles McIntyre, CEO & Co-Founder of IBIS Capital, a company that provides a range of asset management and investment banking services dedicated to the media sector, & Co-Founder of EdTech Europe, Europe's Leading EdTech Conference Platform which hosts an annual EdTech summit. With his deepening involvement in the EdTech field, Charles approached me to ask if I’d be interested in developing a website focussed on e-Learning.

MOOCs certifications are going cuckoo?

By Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

When MOOCs started the only certification users received was a certificate of participation. Probably the low completion rate of the thousand of students registered in a MOOC encouraged MOOC providers to issue a more valued credential to motivate people to finish the courses. Hence, they started to issue certificates of completion, and shortly after, MOOC providers decided to create stronger certifications focused on the needs of the job market. Some examples are:

1) Nanodegrees from Udacity. In one of my previous blogs, I explained:

Sri Lanka and MOOCs…will they get along?

Ramón Talavera Franco

@ratafra

Students in Sri Lanka don’t take MOOCs seriously due to a lack of an effective certification system. Sri Lanka has a certificate-oriented education system rather than knowledge-oriented. Master’s degrees and PhD’s are strongly valued. Therefore students look for certifications in whatever academic path they chose.

This is part of my conversation with Dilrukshi Gamage, a Ph.D. in eLearning and HCI student, at the University of Moratuwa, who I met during the MOOC Design and Development of Educational Technology provided by the edX platform. Our common interest in eLearning and the fact that we both are pursuing a doctoral degree helped keep our communication alive after the course was ended, and now we are frequently in contact via different social media software.