Though the design of and participation in a MOOC may be similar to college or university courses, MOOCs typically do not offer credits awarded to paying students at schools. However, assessment of learning may be done for certification.
Also Wikipedia shares that MOOCs originated from within the open educational resources movement and connectivist roots. More recently, a number of MOOC-type projects have emerged independently, such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. The prominence of these projects' founders, contributing institutions, and financial investment helped MOOCs gain significant public attention in 2012. Some of the attention behind these new MOOCs center on making e-learning more scalable either sustainable or profitable.
According to Willey David MOOCS are Massive but not open, Open but not Massive, and they try hard not to be courses.
According to Educause’s ELI “7 Things You Should Know About MOOCs”, the first MOOC is widely thought to be a course titled “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,” which was co-taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba, delivered to 25 tuition-paying students but offered at the same time to around 2,300 students from the general public who took the online class at no cost.
The MOOCGuide finds 12 benefits of a MOOC
- You can organize a MOOC in any setting that has connectivity (which can include the Web, but also local connections via Wi-Fi e.g.)
- You can organize it in any language you like (taking into account the main language of your target audience)
- You can use any online tools that are relevant to your target region or that are already being used by the participants
- You can move beyond time zones and physical boundaries
- It can be organized as quickly as you can inform the participants (which makes it a powerful format for priority learning in e.g. aid relief)
- Contextualized content can be shared by all
- Learning happens in a more informal setting
- Learning can also happen incidentally thanks to the unknown knowledge that pops up as the course participants start to exchange notes on the course’s study
- You can connect across disciplines and corporate/institutional walls
- You don’t need a degree to follow the course, only the willingness to learn (at high speed)
- You add to your own personal learning environment and/or network by participating in a MOOC
- You will improve your lifelong learning skills, for participating in a MOOC forces you to think about your own learning and knowledge absorption
Possible challenges of a MOOC
- It feels chaotic as participants create their own content.
- It demands digital literacy.- Which in the digital age is still a persistent issue.
- It demands time and effort from the participants.
- It is organic, which means the course will take on its own trajectory (you have got to let go).
- As a participant you need to be able to self-regulate your learning and possibly give yourself a learning goal to achieve. Researches show that with the development of blended learning, students still prefer a reasonable combination between face- to- face meetings and online learning.
Even though we'e reached a high level of humanism, there are higher values in the society that persist leading nations. Make education open will not be as easy as it seems. The expression " Elite education open for masses" is already in its deeper content discriminative and antidemocratic.
Indefinite amount of students will be the issue that will create further problems in the process. Taking in account that fact that students do not pay for it, there will definitely be a lot of student willing to do that. The question about quality& quality needs to be addressed then.
This idea then goes against the EU higher education policy and Bologna process, which students to have the same level after graduation in order to assure mobility throughout EU and outside EU and to assure quality of education.
Whether MOOC is a threat to the Higher Educational System worldwide, is being discusses. George Siemens, the founder of the first MOOC, predicted during a speech
about transformational change at Campus Technology 2012, "The top tier
and elite universities will likely continue to have physical campuses;
the midtier levels, on the other hand, are the ones that are going to
suffer to the greatest degree."
As Washington post claims, lately MOOC providers include a fledgling nonprofit competitor, edX, which has
drawn hundreds of thousands of users to free online courses from Harvard
University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
University of California at Berkeley. On Oct. 15, the University of
Texas system joined them.
MOOC students, for the most part, aren’t earning credit toward degrees.
Educators say that before credits can be awarded, they must be assured
that there are adequate systems to prevent cheating and verify student
identities.
Burck Smith, chief executive of Straighter Line,
which sells low-price online courses, contends that MOOCs are
overhyped. He said universities that give their product away are likely
to face challenges similar to those newspapers confronted when they
launched open-access Web sites.“Free content has never really been a successful business model,” Smith said.
For extra info see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/elite-education-for-the-masses/2012/11/03/c2ac8144-121b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html
http://nation.time.com/2012/09/04/mooc-brigade-will-massive-open-online-courses-revolutionize-higher-education/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/09/06/massive-open-online-course-a-threat-or-opportunity-to-universities/
https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/
http://mobiliteitenopenonderwijs.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/weer-mooc/
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2436
