OPEN
changing the face of higher
professional development.
MOOCs Are the Next Big
Thing in Online Learning
MOOCs—massive open online courses— are all the rage these days, with hundreds of thousands of participants signing up and
investors plunking down millions to get a piece of the
pie. Why is there so much excitement about this new
disruptive form of online learning? And how does this
model apply to professional learning for teachers?
Let’s start with looking at what constitutes a
MOOC. MOOCs clearly have a unique structure, but
there is no hard-and-fast rule as to what qualifies as
massive. While Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence MOOC drew
more than 160,000 participants, other MOOCs may attract as few as 100 students. There is no magic number,
and many agree with Alan Levine, a facilitator of the
University of Mary Washington’s Digital Storytelling
course, who says, “The massive part is not really critical.”
Open generally means that anyone who wants to participate is allowed to at no cost. However, some institutions do charge participants who want to earn college
credits for MOOCs, and this is likely to become more
common. While some MOOCs offer open-licensed
content that anyone can remix and reuse, others are
based on proprietary, copyright-protected content.
The term open also refers to how transparent course
activity is. Whereas some MOOCs exist behind pass-word-protected firewalls (arguably not open), many
MOOCs are set up so that anyone can observe. “
Having a larger public audience for the learning and work
that gets done … changes learners’ whole attitude,”
Levine says. Regardless of how it is defined, the aspect
of openness is what most differentiates MOOCs from
other online courses.
Online is perhaps the one unvarying element of
these courses. They all are offered in an online format,
though many have a face-to-face component too.
There are other variables across MOOCs. Some have
intensive, ongoing involvement of instructors, and
others have instructors with less active roles. Some
MOOCs are peer driven and participatory, whereas
others allow learners to function more independently
and in isolation. Some rely on automated assessment,
and others are project based. (See “A Brief History of
MOOCs on page 16.)
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