Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

What Is a MOOC?
A massive open online course (MOOC) is a model for delivering learning
content online to any person who wants to take a course, with no limit on
attendance.

MOOCs and Open Education Timeline (updated 2015 version)

A Brief History of MOOCs
The term MOOC was coined
to refer to a course developed by Stephen
Downes and George Siemensentitled Connectivism and Connectivity Knowledgein
2008.
Their intention was to exploit the possibility for interactions
between a wide variety of participants made possible by online tools so as
to provide a richer learning environment than traditional tools would
allow. 25 students attended the course on the campus of the University of
Manitoba, and a further 2300 from around the world participated online.
MOOCs with an emphasis on interactions and connectivity are now called
cMOOCS.
In the fall of 2011, Stanford offered three courses for free online. Peter
Norvig and Sebastien
Thrun offered
theirIntroduction
to
Artificial
Intelligence to an initial enrollment of over 160,000 students from around
the world. Over 20,000 students completed the course. These xMOOCs focused
less on interaction between students and more on exploiting the
possibilities of reaching a massive audience.
Thrun founded a company called Udacity in February 2012 which began to
develop and offer MOOCs for free. In April 2012, Andrew Ng and Daphne
Koller,
two
other
Stanford
CS
professors,
started
a
company
called Courserawhich partnered with universities in preparing and offering
MOOCs.
MIT developed the MITx platform for offering MOOCs, which was renamed edX
when
a
partnership
with
Harvard
was
formed.
The
non-profit edX

consortium which develops and offers MOOCs now has over 30 university
partners, including McGill. The consortium has made available an open
source version of the platform which can be used and developed by other
institutions and individuals.
The consortium also carries out research
into learning using new technologies by analyzing data it obtains from
students in the courses. Indeed, the consortium is an outgrowth of an
earlier MIT project engaged in such research.
More than 4 million students have enrolled for Coursera MOOCs; both Udacity
and edX have enrolled over a million students in their MOOCs.
Udacity partnered with San Jose State to offer for-credit courses which
were not free but were very low cost and blended MOOCs material with
support from on-campus professors and teaching assistants. Such success
had Sebastian Thrun suggesting that in 50 years there might only be 10
institutions offering higher education.
However, the San Jose State experiment was less than successful, with pass
rates in some courses significantly lower in the blended courses than under
the traditional model. Furthermore, there is a high dropout rate of over
90% in most MOOCs. In November 2013, Thrun stated that Udacity had a lousy
product and that they would refocus on vocational education. In
contrast, Anant Agarwal, the president of the edX consortium, insists that
students and universities are benefiting from the provision of MOOCs.

cMOOCs are based on principles from connectivist pedagogy indicating

that material should be aggregated (rather than pre-selected), remixable,
re-purposable, and feeding forward (i.e. evolving materials should be
targeted at future learning).[28][29][30][31] cMOOC instructional design
approaches attempt to connect learners to each other to answer questions
and/or collaborate on joint projects. This may include emphasizing
collaborative
development
of
the
MOOC.
Ravenscroft
claimed
that
connectivist MOOCs better support collaborative dialogue and knowledge
building.
xMOOCs have a much more traditional course structure typically with a
clearly specified syllabus of recorded lectures and self-test problems.
They employ elements of the original MOOC, but are, in effect, branded IT
platforms that offer content distribution partnerships to institutions.
The instructor is the expert provider of knowledge, and student
interactions are usually limited to asking for assistance and advising
each other on difficult points.

Challenges and criticisms

The MOOC Guide suggests five possible challenges for cMOOCs:

1. Relying

on user-generated content can create a chaotic learning

environment

2. Digital literacy is necessary to make use of the online materials

3. The

time and effort required from participants may exceed what

students are willing to commit to a free online course

4. Once

the course is released, content will be reshaped and

reinterpreted by the massive student body, making the course
trajectory difficult for instructors to control

5. Participants must self-regulate and set their own goals

Trends
1. Rise of Self Paced Courses
MOOCs started out with a structure parallel to college classroom courses,
with a start and end date, and specific deadlines for assignments. One
issue with these courses is that students would not know whenor ifthe
class would be offered again. Currently, 55% of all courses listed on Class
Central do not have an upcoming start date.
Recently, MOOC providers have moved towards a self-paced model, meaning
that courses are always open to signup and users can complete a course at
their own pace. There are now more than 800 self-paced courses (20% of all
MOOCs on Class Central), and the number is growing quickly. Coursera also
introduced regularly scheduled sessions with soft deadlines. These sessions
usually run once a month. If a student is not able to finish the course,
they can always move to the next session without losing their place in the
course.
2. The Death of Free Certificates
The pursuit of revenues has meant that many MOOC providers have stopped
offering free certificates. The average cost of a Coursera certificate is
$56; for edX, $53. Coursera is going one step further and is introducing a
paywall for graded assignments for some courses.
3. MOOCs Targeted at High Schoolers
MOOC providers have started targeting high schoolers with the intentions of
closing the college readiness gap, helping students to get a taste of

different majors through introductory courses, and providing exam

preparation (like AP) courses.Two specific MOOC providers are leading the
charge: edX with its High School Initiative, and FutureLearn with the Going
to University Collection.
4. Big MOOC Providers Find their Business Models
One of the big trends last year was MOOC providers creating their own
credentials: Udacitys Nanodegrees, Courseras Specializations and edXs
Xseries. For Coursera and Udacity, these credentials have become a main
source of revenue, and both companies have raised big venture rounds to
create more. Currently there are more than 100 credentials available from
MOOC providers.
EdX, on the other hand is focusing on creating ways for students to earn
credit with MOOCs. Earlier this year in April, the nonprofit partnered with
Arizona State University to create the Global Freshman Academy. EdX has
also announced a few more partnerships and initiatives so that students can
earn credits through institutions like the American Council on Education,
Charter Oak State College and MIT.
5. Big Funding Rounds to Accelerate Growth
As the large MOOC providers have appeared to have found their business
models, they have been raising huge funding rounds. In August Coursera
announced a Series C round $61.1M USD. Soon after in November, Udacity
announced a Series D funding round of $105M, reaching a tech unicorn
status, with a valuation north of $1 billion. The UKs Open University has
announced that it will invest 13M into its subsiiary FutureLearn over the
next three years. In each case, the MOOC provider has made it clear that
the funds will be used to accelerate course and certification creationso
get ready for a dramatic expansion of MOOC courses

The Benefits of MOOCs

(1) MOOC creates the opportunity for sharing ideas & knowledge and also
helps improving lifelong learning skills by providing easy access to global
resources.
(2) It improves cross cultural relationships which leads to collaboration
between institution educators and learners locally and internationally.
(3) It gives an idea where I stand in the course in the current world as
large number of students all over the globe would have registered for the
same course on the same common platform and participate in the activities
and discussion in the study group.

(4) MOOC enhances active learning. Research shows that students learn more
through active learning (i.e. when they have assignments or discussion on
an issue) rather than through listening to lectures. Students listen to
lectures more attentively if they have been given a problem or task to
solve before the lecture. In this regard the structure that most MOOCs have
short lectures alternating with assignments and quizzes seems to be
ideal. Of course, one could also do this in a classroom, but it would be
more difficult to ensure that all students participate: some might need
longer to assimilate the content of the lecture, and prefer to listen to it
again before doing the assignment [2]. Peer-to-peer contact facilitated by
MOOC can also trigger effective active learning.
(5) MOOC encourages flipping the classroom. Teacher-student contact time
usually used for lectures could be used differently, e.g. for discussions,
experiments, project and group-work, working with peers etc. Students watch
lectures online at home and interact with faculty regarding their doubts
while in class. It has been strongly advocated and demonstrated by Salman
Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, in the context of school teaching.
Teachers get time to work with students on an individual basis.
(6) Knowledge sharing in Discussion Forum helps reflective and global
learners along with active and sequential learners. Reflective learners who
are not able to share ideas inside the physical classroom can put their
ideas in discussion forum ad get the view points of others. Global learners
who feel themselves lost in the beginning can share their diverse ideas on
the forum and can get others suggestions to find their solution. To know
about different types of learners follow the post Different Learning
Styles.
(7) No exam fever encourages deep approach of learning against the
surface & strategic approach of learning.To know more about different
approach of learning follow the post Different strategies of learning.
(8) Peer evaluation provides the opportunity to learn via grading others.
Because it is the best way to learn when you teach or grade someone else.
(9) MOOC provides the opportunity to learn from world class universities
and from renowned instructors without being a student of the respective
university while sitting in the any part of the world.
(10) MOOC opens up the facility to get free of cost statement of
accomplishment signed by the instructor of the course, which someone
completes in all respect according to the requirement of the subject. There
are provision to earn the verified certificates with university logo and
instructor signature on the payment of the course fee. Anyone can show
these certificates at the time of job applications also. The employer can
go to the corresponding MOOC provider database to get the information

regarding the candidate. Some universities also started allowing to fulfill

credit requirements of a degree from the MOOC courses.