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.