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MOOC.

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Well, what's that?

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The word MOOC is an acronym.

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I should at least say once what it stands
for: Massive Online Open Course.

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That was the easy part, just to give you
those words.

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Now to give a definition, that's going to
be very challenging.

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For every one of those words, I think it's
fair

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to say that there is a generally accepted
understanding of what

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the word means, but then there is a
substantial number of

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people who challenge that understanding,
who try to push it further.

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For instance, massive, you can't give a
number there because

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a thousand students is already a large
class for an instructor.

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But it's ridiculously small compared to some
of the MOOCs

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which have managed to attract hundreds of
thousands of students.

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Online should be clear.

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It means people do activities online such
as watching

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videos, reading texts, answering quizzes,
or talking on forums.

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That's what most people accept but it
ignores that

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some professors have tried to preach to
the physical world.

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For instance, by meeting their
students, or organizing Meet Ups in

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different cities, or by assigning
real-life physical lab work to do at home.

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The course part should also be clear.

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The beast must have pedagogical goals and
a structure that matches those goals.

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That means they should be more like a tutorial 
than a reference manual or an encyclopedia.

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But then, some people throw in other
concepts with the word, course.

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Maybe you should get a degree at the end.

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Maybe you should have a class and teach a
bunch of

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students at once, so, a big group of
students that you teach.

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Finally, the word open is more
controversial.

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In MOOCs, it's open because students
should

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be allowed to take the class for free.

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They should have access to the content for
free.

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They can have to pay for some extra
services, such as a certificate.

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But really in the end, access to content
is free for the learner.

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The problem here is that it's a very
different usage

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of the word open from the usage
popularized in the past.

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For instance, before there existed open

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educational resources or open courseware,
that

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still exists but it used the word open in
a different way.

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Open educational resources are teaching
material with a very permissive license,

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and is available for any teacher to use
and reuse in their own class.

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It's sort of encouraging recycling if you
want.

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Open CourseWare is one of MIT's
initiatives in

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this direction, offering MIT classes for
anyone to reuse.

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If you want, they' are like open educational resources already structured in a course format.

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Ultimately with MOOC, or with Massive
Online Open Course, you get four

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words, four different flavors, and
everyone

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in every course combines these flavors
differently.

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That's the way I see it, at least.

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The most important aspect of the MOOC

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revolution in education is that new
technology

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to support each of those flavors is

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being actively developed and integrated
into one framework.

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Then educators can tweak each, innovate,
and

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repurpose the technology for their own
means.

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For instance, I've heard of very
successful,

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small, private, online courses using
M.O.O.C. platforms.

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And many universities have started to use

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these platforms to support their own
residential teaching.

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That's what's exciting about MOOCs: a lot

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of new technology aimed at improving
education.