A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aiming at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOCs are a recent development in distance education which sometimes use open educational resources. They are similar to college courses, but typically do not offer academic credit. Other forms of assessment or certification may be available including those based on learning analytics for online environments. Some colleges may now offer credit by exam for students who have studied using a MOOC. MOOCs are also used to help students explore interests, choose a major, prepare for entrance exams, gain exposure to college level coursework, and decide on whether or not college is right for them. MOOCs are also used for faculty development, educating the general public, providing learning opportunities for those who lack access to college courses, and spreading new ideas rapidly to large numbers of people.

MOOCs originated within the open educational resources (OER) movement and connectivist roots. Several MOOC-type projects have emerged independently, such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX.^[1] Others, like Canvas Network and CourseSites by Blackboard Inc have evolved from learning management systems. MOOCs gained significant public attention in 2012 due to the prominence of MOOC project founders and contributing institutions, as well as the large financial investment designed to make e-learning more scalable and sustainable.^[2]

MOOCs have at least two key features:

• Open access. MOOC participants do not need to register as students and are not required to pay a fee.
• Large scale. Traditional courses have a smaller ratio of students to teacher, but MOOCs are designed to have a "massive" number of students.

Other features associated with early MOOCs, such as open licensing of content, open structure and learning goals, community-centeredness, etc. may not be present in all MOOC projects.^[3]

[edit]History

[edit]Precursors

Many of the ideas behind MOOCs predate the Digital Age. In the 1890s commercial and academic correspondence courses on specialized topics (such as how to pass a civil service test) took root and by the 1920s over 4 million Americans were enrolled in correspondence courses covering hundreds of practical job-oriented topics--far more than attended traditional colleges. The completion rate was under 3%.^[4] Motion pictures were used to train millions of draftees during World War II; actor Ronald Reagan made such films for the U.S. Air Force. Universities in the 1940s offered courses by radio, and later by television, in which the students read textbooks and listened to broadcast lectures.^[5] Architect Buckminster Fuller gave a lecture in 1961 which proposed industrial scale educational technology.^[6] In 1962 American inventor Douglas Engelbart proposed a research agenda titled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework to the Stanford Research Institute in which he emphasized using the computer as a collaborative tool. In this proposal, Engelbart advocated for the widespread personalization of computers and explained how the personal computer in coordination with an "interconnected network of computers" could result in massive information sharing.

The short lecture format used by many MOOCs developed from "Khan Academy’s free archive of snappy instructional videos."^[7]

[edit]Early MOOCs

The term MOOC was coined in 2008 during a course called "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" that was presented to 25 tuition-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba in addition to 2,300 other students from the general public who took the online class free of charge. All course content was available through RSS feeds, and learners could participate with their choice of tools: threaded discussions in Moodle, blog posts, Second Life, and synchronous online meetings. The term 'MOOC' was coined by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island, and Senior Research FellowBryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Educationin response to an open online course designed and led by George Siemens ofAthabasca University and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council (Canada).

Soon other independent MOOCs emerged. Jim Groom from The University of Mary Washington and Michael Branson Smith of York College, City University of New York, adopted this course structure and hosted their own MOOCs through several universities. Early MOOCs departed from formats that relied on posted resources, learning management systems, and structures that mix the learning management system with more open web resources.^[10] MOOCs from private, non-profit institutions^[11] emphasized prominent faculty members and expanded open offerings to existing subscribers (e.g., podcast listeners) into free and open online courses.

[edit]Recent developments

In the fall of 2011 Stanford University launched 3 courses, each of which had an enrollment of about 100,000.^[12]

Following the publicity and high enrollment numbers of these course, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launchedCoursera. By leveraging technology already developed at Stanford, Coursera was able to launch two courses – machine learning by Andrew Ng and databases by Jennifer Widom, which were the first two of Stanford's MOOC classes to go live. Coursera subsequently announced partnerships with several other universities, including theUniversity of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Stanford University, and The University of Michigan. Concerned about the commercialization of online education, MIT launched the MITx not-for-profit later in the fall, an effort to develop a free and open online platform. The inaugural course, 6.002x, launched in March 2012. Harvard joined the initiative, renamed edX, that spring, and University of California, Berkeley joined in the summer. The edX initiative now also includes the University of Texas System, Wellesley College and theGeorgetown University.

In November, 2012, the first high school MOOC was launched by the University of Miami Global Academy, UM's online high school. The course became available for high school students preparing for the SAT Subject Test in Biology, providing access for students from any high school. About the same time Wedubox, first big MOOC in Spanish, started with the beta course including 1,000 professors.^[13]

As MOOCs have evolved, there appear to be two distinct types: those that emphasize the Connectivist philosophy, and those that resemble more traditional and well-financed courses, such as those offered by Coursera and edX. To distinguish between the two, Stephen Downes proposed the terms "cMOOC" and "xMOOC".^[14] The evolution of MOOCs has also seen innovation in instructional materials. An emerging trend in MOOCs is the use of nontraditional textbooks such as graphic novels to improve students' knowledge retention.^[15]

As of February, 2013 a substantial number of universities had affiliated with MOOCs including many international institutions.^[16][17]

[edit]Instructional design approaches

Because of the massive scale of learners, and the likelihood of a high student-teacher ratio, MOOCs require instructional design that facilitates large-scale feedback and interaction. There are two basic approaches:

• Crowd-sourced interaction and feedback by leveraging the MOOC network, e.g. for peer-review, group collaboration
• Automated feedback through objective, online assessments, e.g. quizzes and exams

Connectivist MOOCs rely on the former approach; broadcast MOOCs such as those offered by Coursera or Udacityrely more on the latter.^[18]

Because a MOOC provides a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse,^[19] and some instructional design approaches to MOOCs attempt to maximize the opportunity of connected learners who may or may not know each other already, through their network. This may include emphasizing collaborative development of the MOOC itself, or of learning paths for individual participants.

[edit]Connectivist design principles

Connectivist MOOCs are based on several principles stemming from connectivist pedagogy.^{[20][21][22][23]} The principles include:

1. Aggregation. The whole point of a connectivist MOOC is to provide a starting point for a massive amount of content to be produced in different places online, which is later aggregated as a newsletter or a web page accessible to participants on a regular basis. This is in contrast to traditional courses, where the content is prepared ahead of time.
2. The second principle is remixing, that is, associating materials created within the course with each other and with materials elsewhere.
3. Re-purposing of aggregated and remixed materials to suit the goals of each participant.
4. Feeding forward, sharing of re-purposed ideas and content with other participants and the rest of the world.

An earlier list (2005) of Connectivist principles^[24] from Siemens also informs the pedagogy behind MOOCs:

1. Learning and knowledge rest in diversity of opinions.
2. Learning is a process of connecting specialised nodes or information sources.
3. Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
4. Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.
5. Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
6. Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
7. Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
8. Decision making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

[edit]MOOC experiences

MOOCs attract large numbers of participants, sometimes several thousands, most of whom participate peripherally ("lurk"). For example, the first MOOC in 2008 had 2200 registered members, of whom 150 were actively interacting at various times.^[25] Learners can control where, what, how, with whom they learn, but different learners choose to exercise more or less of that control. The goal is to re-define the very idea of a "course," creating an open network of learners with emergent and shared content and interactions. A MOOC allows participants to form connections through autonomous, diverse, open, and interactive discourse.^[26]

Most MOOCs that have featured "Massive" participation have been courses emphasizing learning on the web. "Students" have been educators, business people, researchers and others interested in internet culture.

Principles of openness inform the creation, structure and operation of MOOCs. The extent to which practices of Open Design in educational technology^[27] are applied to a particular MOOC seem to vary with the planners involved. Research by Kop and Fournier ^[26] highlighted as major challenges for novice learners on MOOCs the lack of social presence and the high level of autonomy required to operate in such a learning environment. According to some comments in MOOC discussion forums, features that are normally associated with an educational activity can appear to be completely missing. Structure, direction and purpose sometimes seem lost in the scattering of discussions, and this messiness, although it also creates a buzz, can make following a line of discussion or creating meaning challenging.^{[citation needed]}

[edit]Potential benefits

The MoocGuide^[28] lists 12 benefits of a MOOC:

1. You can organize a MOOC in any setting that has connectivity (which can include the Web, but also local connections via Wi-Fi e.g.)
2. You can organize it in any language you like (taking into account the main language of your target audience)
3. You can use any online tools that are relevant to your target region or that are already being used by the participants
4. You can move beyond time zones and physical boundaries
5. It can be organized as quickly as you can inform the participants (which makes it a powerful format for priority learning in e.g. aid relief)
6. Contextualized content can be shared by all
7. Learning happens in a more informal setting
8. Learning can also happen incidentally thanks to the unknown knowledge that pops up as the course participants start to exchange notes on the course’s study
9. You can connect across disciplines and corporate/institutional walls
10. You don’t need a degree to follow the course, only the willingness to learn (at high speed)
11. You add to your own personal learning environment and/or network by participating in a MOOC
12. You will improve your lifelong learning skills, for participating in a MOOC forces you to think about your own learning and knowledge absorption

[edit]Challenges and criticisms

The MoocGuide ^[28] lists 5 possible challenges for collaborative-style moocs:

1. It feels chaotic as participants create their own content
2. It demands digital literacy
3. It demands time and effort from the participants
4. It is organic, which means the course will take on its own trajectory (you have got to let go).
5. As a participant you need to be able to self-regulate your learning and possibly give yourself a learning goal to achieve.

In addition, other concerns have been raised regarding the nature of moocs, including:

• Concerns have been raised around the 'territorial' nature of moocs ^[29] with little discussion around: 1) who enrolls in/completes courses; 2) The implications of courses scaling across country borders, and potential difficulties with relevance and knowledge transfer; 3) the need for territory-specific study of locally relevant issues and needs.
• Other features associated with early MOOCs, such as open licensing of content, open structure and learning goals, community-centeredness, etc. may not be present in all MOOC projects.^[3]

[edit]Business models

Randy Best, the chairman of Academic Partnerships (a company that helps public universities move their courses online) states, “We started it, frankly, as a campaign to grow enrollment. But 72 to 84 percent of those who did the first (FREE) course came back and paid to take the second course.” The interim Provost of the University of Cincinnati states, “We’re confident that once MOOC students begin interacting with our expert faculty and their fellow classmates, they’ll begin forming a lasting educational relationship with the university.”^[30]

[edit]See also

• Outcome-based education
• Distance education
• Open educational resources
• Connectivism
• E-learning

[edit]References