MOOC.

Well, what's that?

The word MOOC is an acronym.

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

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

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

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

to say that there is a generally accepted
understanding of what

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

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

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

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

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

which have managed to attract hundreds of
thousands of students.

Online should be clear.

It means people do activities online such
as watching

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

That's what most people accept but it
ignores that

some professors have tried to preach to
the physical world.

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

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

The course part should also be clear.

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

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

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

Maybe you should get a degree at the end.

Maybe you should have a class and teach a
bunch of

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

Finally, the word open is more
controversial.

In MOOCs, it's open because students
should

be allowed to take the class for free.

They should have access to the content for
free.

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

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

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

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

For instance, before there existed open

educational resources or open courseware,
that

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

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

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

It's sort of encouraging recycling if you
want.

Open CourseWare is one of MIT's
initiatives in

this direction, offering MIT classes for
anyone to reuse.

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

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

words, four different flavors, and
everyone

in every course combines these flavors
differently.

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

The most important aspect of the MOOC

revolution in education is that new
technology

to support each of those flavors is

being actively developed and integrated
into one framework.

Then educators can tweak each, innovate,
and

repurpose the technology for their own
means.

For instance, I've heard of very
successful,

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

And many universities have started to use

these platforms to support their own
residential teaching.

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

of new technology aimed at improving
education.