MOOCs, where is the quality control?

I recently saw a great article on how to create a recommendation system in R by yhat. I thought it looked fun and decided to hook one up myself. Thinking about datasets I started to wonder about recommendation systems that might I might use. The one that immediately sprang to mind was one based on MOOCs.

I thought a MOOC recommendation system would be a good idea because I sign up to lots of them, but complete none. I headed onto the web to find a dataset of reviews and found practically nothing! Which makes me wonder, when MOOCs are free, how do we control the quality?

Here are some things I did find.

1) Coursetalk.org is a review and ratings site, unfortunatly to make any kind of recommendation system I’d need access to the reviews via API. Unable to find anything on the website I emailed the developer asking for access and this was the reply:

2) I contacted a colleague who has been on quite a few MOOCs (and actually finished some!), who pointed to the only thing about quality in MOOCs that she knew about, an EFQUEL initiative.

I feel a bit disheartened by the whole thing, for now I might have to do some screenscraping 🙁

Update:

It might be worth following this project