Massive open online course

A massive open online course (MOOC) is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOCs are a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources.

Though the design of and participation in a MOOC may be similar to college or university courses, MOOCs typically do not offer credits awarded to paying students at schools. However, assessment of learning may be done for certification.

MOOCs originated from within the open educational resources movement and connectivist roots, a number of MOOC-type projects have emerged independently, such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. The prominence of these projects' founders, contributing institutions, and financial investment helped MOOCs gain significant public attention in 2012. Some of the attention behind these new MOOCs center on making e-learning more scalable either sustainable or profitable.

While there is no commonly accepted definition of a MOOC, two key features seem prevalent:

• Open access. MOOC participants don't need to be a registered student in a school to "take" a MOOC, and aren't required to pay a fee.
• Scalability. Many traditional courses depend upon a small ratio of students to teacher, but the "massive" in MOOC suggests that the course is designed to support an indefinite number of participants.

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.

History

Theoretical Roots

While massive open online courses are a relatively recent development, the ideas behind MOOCs predate the Digital Age. Ideas for such an educational tool can be accurately traced as far back as the early 1960s. Buckminster Fuller gave a lecture on 22 April 1961 which proposed industrial scale educational technology. In 1962 American inventor and intellectual innovator Douglas Engelbart proposed a research agenda titled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework to the Stanford Research Institute in which he emphasizes the possibilities of utilizing the computer as a collaborative tool for intellectual accession. In this proposal, Engelbart advocates for the widespread personalization of computers and explains how the Personal Computer in coordination with an "interconnected network of computers" could potentially result in a massive, worldwide effect of information sharing.

Influence of Ivan Illich on Connectivism

Since then many computer enthusiasts and educational revolutionaries such as Ivan Illich have produced numerous academic journals, manifestos and research proposals that advocate for openness in the educational process and for the use of computing technology integrated into the learning process as a means of reforming a "broken educational system." In one of Ivan Illich's critical discourses entitled Deschooling Society (ca. 1971), Illich argues that our contemporary educational layout is intellectually stifling due to such forces as non-flexible curriculum and lecture style "learning". In his critique, Illich mentions the idea of incorporating advanced technology into our school system so as to create what he labels, "decentralized learning webs." Illich affirms that the establishment of such "learning webs" would in turn connect and involve more students in the learning process, thus creating a more efficient and engaging mode of learning. Illich feels that overall "A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known."

While a large number of educators felt that this particular stance on the learning process was overly radical, utopic and unachievable, there were many individuals who came to adopt and support the views of people like Illich. It was these individuals who would continue to propel this push for educational revolution forward.

Early MOOCs

David Wiley taught what ostensibly was the first MOOC, or proto-MOOC, at Utah State University in August, 2007. This was a graduate course in open education that was opened to participation by anyone around the world. What would otherwise have been a class of only five graduate students became a group of over 50 people in eight countries.

The term MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier, Manager of Web Communication and Innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island, and Senior Research Fellow Bryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education in response to an open online course designed and led by George Siemens, associate director, Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and Stephen Downes, Senior Researcher at The National Research Council (Canada). The course was called "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" and was presented to 25 tuition-paying students 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.

Soon other independent MOOCs emerged, including PLENK2010 and DS106. including Jim Groom from The University of Mary Washington and Michael Branson Smith of York College, City University of New York, have adopted this course structure and successfully hosted their own MOOCs through various universities across the globe.

As an evolution of online courses, early MOOCs departed from formats that rely on posted resources, learning management systems, and structures that mix the LMS with more open web resources. MOOCs from private, non-profit institutions emphasized prominent faculty members and have expanded open offerings to existing subscribers (e.g., podcast listeners) into free and open online courses.

Takeoff

A major breakthrough came in Fall, 2011 when over 160,000 people signed up for a course in artificial intelligence, offered by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig through Thrun's start-up Know Labs (now, Udacity).

Following the publicity and high enrollment numbers of the AI course, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng launched Coursera. By leveraging technology already developed at Stanford, Coursera was able to launch two courses—machine learning by Andrew Ng and databases by Jennifer Widom shortly after Thrun's original course went live. Concerned about the commercialization of on-line education, MIT launched the MITx not-for-profit later in the fall, an effort to develop a free and open platform for on-line education. The inaugural course, 6.002x, launched in March 2012. Harvard joined the initiative, renamed edX, later in the spring, and Berkeley joined in the summer.

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-source interaction and feedback by leveraging the MOOC network, e.g. for peer-review, group collaboartion
• Automate feedback through objective, online assessments, e.g. quizzes and exams

Connectivist MOOCs rely on the former approach; MOOCs such as those offered by Coursera or Udacity rely more on the latter.

Because a MOOC provides a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse, 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.

Connectivist Design Principles

MOOCs are based on several principles stemming from connectivist pedagogy.

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 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.

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. 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.

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 are applied to a particular MOOC seem to vary with the planners involved. Research by Kop and Fournier 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.

Potential Benefits of MOOCs

There are many benefits to adopting MOOCs as a source for knowledge augmentation, among which include:

• Learning occurs in an informal setting/manner rather than in a classroom setting where a strict curriculum may be present.
• All work, thoughts and instruction can be shared, critiqued and viewed by all participants.
• All that is needed to participate is an internet connection.
• Students are often afforded a wide variety of assignments to choose from (In contrast with contemporary education systems which require all students to submit the same assignment at the same time.
• MOOCs are free for all who are interested.
• A MOOC can be established by educators at a low cost, using free tools to aid in constructing a course.
• Participants do not have to be enrolled in the institution which hosts the MOOC.
• Language barriers are not an issue due to the availability of website translation.
• A MOOC's course flexibility allows for the student to "attend" when he/she has the time availability.
• MOOC's allow for the connection across all professional disciplines as well as across corporation/institution boundaries as well.
• Direct immersion and engagement within the topic at hand.
• Digital skill development.
• Networking.

Potential Challenges of MOOCs

Because the whole concept behind MOOCs is a relatively new one, there are potential challenges or issues which students "enrolled" may face, among which include:

• The need for basic digital literacy.
• A feeling of confusion and disorientation for students who are used to strict, syllabus directed, lecture courses.
• The students' need for self-regulation of learning.
• The possibility for the course to take on its own course direction due to the organic and free flowing nature of MOOCs.
• The potential for minor interaction with the course instructor (unless formally enrolled through the institution).
• The lack of in person, real world socializing, presenting and practical experience.
• The increased likelihood of academic dishonesty, particularly with online examinations, due to a lack of regulation and supervision.
• Technical difficulties associated with the complete reliance on computers and internet connectivity.
• Difficulty in assessing complex learning of potentially tens of thousands of students whose intent may be to document learning to current or future employers or other higher education providers.

Examples of MOOCs

• Crypt4you - Aula Virtual de Criptografía y Seguridad de la Información. Politechnical University of Madrid - Spain. First MOOC in Spanish. March 2012

• Change.MOOC - Change: Education, Learning, and Technology! (Fall 2011) Facilitated by Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Dave Cormier

• Creativity and Multicultural Communication - facilitated by Carol Yeager and Betty Lawrence at SUNY/Empire State College (Fall 2011)

• EpCoPMOOC - e-Porfolio / Community of Practice MOOC! (August 2011) https://sites.google.com/site/eportfoliocommunity/epcop-mooc

• eduMOOC - Online Learning Today and Tomorrow (Summer 2011)

by the University of Illinois at Springfield enrolled 2,600+

• DS106 - Digital Storytelling (Spring 2011–present). Taught by Jim Groom at the University of Mary Washington. Digital Storytelling

• MobiMOOC - Mobile Learning (Spring 2011)

• LAK11 - Learning and Knowledge Analytics (Spring 2011). Facilitated by George Siemens, Jon Dron, Dave Cormier, Tanya Elias, and Sylvia Currie.

• EdFutures - Futures thinking in Education (Spring 2010)

• PLENK 2010 - Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge (Fall 2010) Facilitated by Dave Cormier, George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Rita Kop

• Connect! Your PLN Lab (Fall 2009)

• Connectivism (Fall 2008) - "the first MOOC" (also offered Fall 2009 and 2011)

Taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, this MOOC had a for-credit component for a limited number of students through the University of Manitoba. The term "MOOC" was coined in association with this course offering.

• EC&I 831 - Social Media & Open Education (January 2008). Taught by Alec Couros at the University of Regina

• INST 7150 - Intro to Open Education (August - December, 2007).

Websites of different MOOCs

• Academic Room - Over 1,000 full-length lecture videos of courses curated from Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Duke and Carnegie Mellon, accompanied by course materials such as books, journal articles and syllabi for self-paced learning.
• Coursera - A VC-funded company founded by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from Stanford University, located in Mountain View, California.
• edX is a non-profit led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley, that offers university-level courses from a wide range of disciplines online to a worldwide audience at no charge.
• Udacity - A company founded by David Stavens, Mike Sokolsky, and Sebastian Thrun, with the stated goal of democratizing education.
• WizIQ - Education online
• A Gentle Introduction to Python A innovative coordination by "Mechanical Mooc" using OpenCourseWare, quizzes and exercises from Codecademy, study groups organized through OpenStudy, and a mailing list hosted by Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU).
• [http://www.khanacademy.org/ KhanAcademy, a peer-to-peer tutorial videos about various fields of sciences
• University of Reddit -
• Venture Lab @ Stanford -

Open source tools for running MOOCs

• Openmooc. Universidad Nacional Education Distancia(Spain)
• Class2go. Stanford University (USA)
• Drupal Distribution - Massively Open Online Course

External links and further reading

• "MOOC pedagogy: the challenges of developing for Coursera"
• "Babson Survey Research Group: National reports on growth of online learning in US Higher Education"
• Video Washington Journal August 7, 2012 "discussion on a new trend in higher education: <assive open online courses or MOOCs."
• "Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education"
• Amanda Kraus, "Opinion Time! Udacity, Pearson, MOOCs and UVA" Blog post, "Worst Professor Ever", June 18, 2012
• A. McAuley, B. Stewart, G, Siemens and D. Cormier, The MOOC Model for Digital Practice (2010)
• R. Kop, The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol 12, No 3 (2011)
• D. Levy, Lessons Learned from Participating in a Connectivist Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), (2011)
• S.F. John Mak, R. Williams, and J. Mackness, Blogs and Forums as Communication and Learning Tools in a MOOC, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on

Networked Learning (2010)

• Siemens, G. Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing roles for Educators and Designers. Presented to ITFORUM for Discussion (January 27, 2008)
• Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for a digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3–10.
• Graham Vickery, Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Participative web and user-created content: web 2.0, wikis and social networking (2007)
• Dialogue and Connectivism: A New Approach to Understanding and Promoting Dialogue-Rich Networked Learning [1] Andrew Ravenscroft International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning Vol. 12.3 March – 2011, Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI), London Metropolitan University, UK
• UNLOCKING the GATES: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access To Their Courses; Taylor Walsh, Princeton University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-691-14874-8
• The Massive Online Professor; Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt; Academic Matters: The Journal of Higher Education; [2]
• Shimon Schocken: The self-organizing computer course TEDTalks on Massive Open Online Course