Learning and Leading - March/April 2013

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOOCS

The term massive open online courses was coined by Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander in reference to the 2008 course Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, which was facilitated by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in partnership with the University of Manitoba. This course was then, and continues to be, offered for credit to registered students as well as to anyone in an open format.

In fall 2011, the evolution of MOOCs took a new direction with Stanford University’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course, facilitated by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. The team that developed it went on to start the for-profit company Udacity, which has attracted considerable attention as a disruptive force in higher education.

Udacity offers courses for free with an option to pay for certification. Another part of Udacity’s model is to match qualified students with hiring companies that it partners with.

Another entry to the MOOC space is Coursera, a for-profit company that partners with leading universities to offer free online courses. Its course offerings span a wide array of topics, from computer science to the humanities and education. Coursera’s pedagogical approach includes mastery learning and peer assessment, which is used where automated assessment is not appropriate.

MIT has long been involved in open online courses through the MIT OpenCourse Ware initiative and recently entered the MOOC space through MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, was offered in 2012 and had nearly 155,000 people registered at the start. Of those, roughly 23,000 tried the first problem set, 9,000 passed the midterm, and 7,157 (or a little more than 4.5% of those registered) passed the course as a whole. Although that final percentage might not seem that impressive, as Anant Agarwal, MIT professor and president of edX, says, “If you look at the number in absolute terms, it’s as many students as might take the course in 40 years at MIT.”

MIT and Harvard created edX in 2012 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing MOOCs. The University of California Berkeley has since joined them.