Telescope, a MOOCs initiative in Latin America: Infrastructure, best practices, completion and dropout analysis

This paper presents the Telescope project, initiated and hosted at Galileo University in Guatemala, which is an initiative for Latin American Region with the similar objective as Coursera or EdX. First it is presented and analyzes the current state of the MOOCs, showing real progress, the broader scope in the academic field and it´s potential as a tool to support education. For Telescope, behavior of students, completion rates and drop-out will be detailed and analyzed, along with assessment approaches and communication methods from four different MOOC experiences given at The MOOCs 2013 experiences presented are from the following courses: Cloud based tools for education, Introduction to e-Learning, Medical Urgencies and Android development. With over 15,000 enrolled students, and learners from over 15 countries. Also, we will present result from drop out learners, from no shows to those who did not complete the whole course experience, presenting the main reasons for drop out: personal reasons, academic and other influencing factors such as course quality and interaction with the tutors, course contents, workload and time management; being the most cited reasons for dropout: personal and workload reasons such as not enough time, increase workload at the job, and also the academic workload was evaluated as too-high in some cases.