What is a MOOC?

The Massive Open Online Course

is a response to the challenges

faced by organizations and distributed disciplines

at a time of information overload.

It used to be that when you wanted to know about something

you could do a few things

You could ask someone

You could buy a book

You could try to figure out for yourself

or you could call a school.

If that school offered the course

in a thing that you were trying to figure out

you could go there and take it

you could get access to information about a topic

An instructor would comb through journals and books

to pull the information together from a library

you might even find others

who are also interested in the same things that you are

The Mooc is built for a world

where information is everywhere

where a social network obsessed with

the same things as you are

is a click away

a digital world

a world where internet connection

gives you access

to a staggering amount of information

This video will introduce you

to how a Massive Open Online Course

is one way of learning in a networked world.

A MOOC is a course.

It's open.

It's participatory

It's distributed

and it supports life-long networked learning.

In one sense

Massive Open Online Course is just that.

It's a course.

It has facilitators, course materials...

It has a start and an end date.

It has participants.

But the MOOC is not a school.

It's not JUST an online course.

It's a way to connect and collaborate

while developing digital skills.

It's a way of engaging in the learning process

that engages what it means to be a student.

It is maybe most importantly,

an event,

around which people who care about a topic

can get together and work and talk about it

in a structured way.

The course is open.

All of the work gets done

in areas accessible for people

to read and reflect and comment on.

The course is open in the sense that

you can go ahead

and take the course without paying for it.

You might pay to get the credits through an institution

but you are not paying for participating in the course.

It's also open in the sense that the work done in the course

is shared among all the people taking it.

The material put together by the facilitators

the work done by the participants

it's all negotiated in the open.

You get to keep your work

and everyone gets to learn from it.

The course is participatory

you really become part of the course

by engaging with other people's work

Participants are not asked

to complete specific assignments

but rather to engage with the material

with each other

and with other material that they may find on the Web.

You make connections between ideas

and between you and other people.

You network.

One of the outcomes

that people get from the course

are the networked connections

they build up through engaging with each other.

The course is distributed

and all these blog posts and discussions posts,

video responses, articles, tweets and tags

all knit together to create a networked course

They're mostly not found at one central location

but rather all over the Internet

in different pockets and clusters

There's no right way to do the course

No single path from the 1st week to the last

this allows for new ideas to develop

and for different points of view to co-exist

it also means that one of the side effects of a MOOC

is the building of a distributed knowledge base on the Net

The course is a step on the road

to life-long learning

MOOCs promote independence among learners

They encourage participants to work in their own spaces

and create authentic networks

they can easily maintain after the course finishes

A MOOC can promote the kind of network creation

that life-long learning is all about.

The course part is just the beginning

How can you go about finding one of these?

Well, news that a MOOC will be offered

usually spreads on online networks

people who have reputations for interesting skills

or innovative thinking on a topic

decide to collaborate

by offering an open online course

covering their topic.

Anyone who wants to join in, CAN

In a MOOC you can choose what YOU do

how you participate

and only you can tell

in the end

if you have been successful

just like in real life.