MOOC.
Well, what's that?
The word MOOC is an acronym.
I should at least say once what it stands for: Massive Online Open Course.
That was the easy part, just to give you those words.
Now to give a definition, that's going to be very challenging.
For every one of those words, I think it's fair
to say that there is a generally accepted understanding of what
the word means, but then there is a substantial number of
people who challenge that understanding, who try to push it further.
For instance, massive, you can't give a number there because
a thousand students is already a large class for an instructor.
But it's ridiculously small compared to some of the MOOCs
which have managed to attract hundreds of thousands of students.
Online should be clear.
It means people do activities online such as watching
videos, reading texts, answering quizzes, or talking on forums.
That's what most people accept but it ignores that
some professors have tried to preach to the physical world.
For instance, by meeting their students, or organizing Meet Ups in
different cities, or by assigning real-life physical lab work to do at home.
The course part should also be clear.
The beast must have pedagogical goals and a structure that matches those goals.
That means they should be more like a tutorial than a reference manual or an encyclopedia.
But then, some people throw in other concepts with the word, course.
Maybe you should get a degree at the end.
Maybe you should have a class and teach a bunch of
students at once, so, a big group of students that you teach.
Finally, the word open is more controversial.
In MOOCs, it's open because students should
be allowed to take the class for free.
They should have access to the content for free.
They can have to pay for some extra services, such as a certificate.
But really in the end, access to content is free for the learner.
The problem here is that it's a very different usage
of the word open from the usage popularized in the past.
For instance, before there existed open
educational resources or open courseware, that
still exists but it used the word open in a different way.
Open educational resources are teaching material with a very permissive license,
and is available for any teacher to use and reuse in their own class.
It's sort of encouraging recycling if you want.
Open CourseWare is one of MIT's initiatives in
this direction, offering MIT classes for anyone to reuse.
If you want, they' are like open educational resources already structured in a course format.
Ultimately with MOOC, or with Massive Online Open Course, you get four
words, four different flavors, and everyone
in every course combines these flavors differently.
That's the way I see it, at least.
The most important aspect of the MOOC
revolution in education is that new technology
to support each of those flavors is
being actively developed and integrated into one framework.
Then educators can tweak each, innovate, and
repurpose the technology for their own means.
For instance, I've heard of very successful,
small, private, online courses using M.O.O.C. platforms.
And many universities have started to use
these platforms to support their own residential teaching.
That's what's exciting about MOOCs: a lot
of new technology aimed at improving education.