-
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 ridiculous small compared to some
of the MOOC's
-
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 breach to
the physical world.
-
For instance, by meeting the, 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 menu 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 education 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, if you want they're 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.
-
[BLANK_AUDIO]