Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a hotly debated trend: The New York Times declared 2012 to be “The Year of the MOOC”. While sociology Professor Mitchell Duneier recently stopped offering his content on the MOOC platform Coursera over licensing disagreements, UNC Chapel Hill is currently launching its first three classes on the Coursera platform.
A good opportunity to take a closer look at the history and context of this educational technology trend:
The original MOOC concept was developed and implemented by the Canadian researchers Stephen Downes and George Siemens in fall 2008. Several other educators followed their example and offered networked learning opportunities to a massive audience – for a current example visit ds106, an open course on digital storytelling developed by Alan Levine. These courses follow a connectivist learning philosophy and are therefore often called cMOOCs. The MOOC idea started to get broader media attention in the fall of 2011, when a series of MOOCs from Stanford each enrolled more than 100,000 participants. In the wake of this success, many universities adopted the MOOC model and several platforms emerged such as Udacity, edX, Coursera, and NovoEd. These MOOCs are usually called xMOOCs since they are taught in a similar fashion to campus-based lecture courses.
Wether cMOOC or xMOOC, the buzz around the acronym is certainly not going to quieten down anytime soon. Even traditional learning management system vendors such as Blackbioard proudly feature a MOOC catalogue. The Gates foundation has launched a MOOC Research Initiative that is coordinated by George Siemens from the Canadian Athabasca University.
And what about the MOOCs from UNC? I am currently enrolled in Metadata: Organizing and Discovering Information by Dr. Jeffrey Pomerantz that started on September 2nd. So far, I have passed my first test and enjoyed a well-produced introduction to metadata with many current references, i.e., the NSA scandal. If I will make it to the end or join the large group of MOOC dropouts remains an open question.
