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In this video, I want to give you a quick
introduction to the history of MOOCs.

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How they came to be, and especially
focusing

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on the mainstream evolution that led to
them.

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For a long while now, many universities
have taped their

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lectures and offered them on private or
public TV channels.

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Some universities were even built around
distance learning.

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For instance, I remember as a kid in the
'80's watching

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on Sunday morning on the BBC Lectures of
the British Open University.

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These lectures were great, and they are
still great fun to watch, if only

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because you could see university
professors wearing

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elephant pants straight out of the '70's.

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Now, in a residential university, the
advantage to taped lectures would be

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that these students can watch a class they
have missed or misunderstood.

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At some point in the 2000s, this
transitioned to the Web.

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Students could know watch classes on
demand with extra convenience.

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But with the transition to the web,
professors

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had now more flexibility and could do
something new.

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They could post handouts on the website,
for instance.

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This is a form of blended learning.

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Or, if they had recorded the lecture one
year,

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say in 2005, in 2006 for the new lecture.

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They could put the old one, the 2005
lecture, online.

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And decide to manage the class time

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differently, in their new, live lecture in
2006.

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Instead of covering that material like
they're always done, they

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could start assuming that the students had
already watched the material.

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And hold more interactive discussions and
challenge the students in class.

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This is called flip teaching where the
goal of the instructor

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is to make face time, with the students
most useful to them.

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To try to engage them in active learning.

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At the same time, if the lectures were
already recorded, it also

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opened up the possibility of sharing all
their material with the world.

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Why not do it?

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This was done by MIT with Open Courseware,
where

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they started to offer freely their regular
lectures online.

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Starting in 2011, it became easier to

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date things, because development vocalized
around Stanford.

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Some professors there realized that their
lectures that were

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available online, for the world, actually
attracted a huge audience.

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In the tens of thousands of students, a
massive scale.

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They decided to create their own startups.

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Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started
Coursera.

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While Sebastian Thrun started Udacity.

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However, unlike Open Coursework.

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This company started offering certificates
and

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raising large levels of venture capital
funding.

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$85 million for Coursera.

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American Universities sense a real threat
there, mostly in a certificate.

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Suddenly, you can buy for hundreds of
dollars and

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hard work, what usually required $40,000
and hard work.

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As a response, Standford started Class to
Go and MIT started EDX.

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EDX was set up as a non profit startup and
quickly Harvard, Berkeley,

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and a bunch of other major schools joined
them on the portal, EDX.org.

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Stanford even decided to drop Class2Go and
work with EDX, because

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their software was open source and
available for anyone to use.

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You can see them at Stanford Online.

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These are Universities that compete on
everything else but there they

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collaborated and injected money at levels
that matched adventure capital fund.

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So, the situation at this stage is that
Coursera is

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the major MOOC portal that has agreement
with around 100 universities.

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Basing them, there is an unusual alliance
of the

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world's most famous universities trying to
contract Coursera's dominance.

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In addition, a bunch of other initiatives
have been

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started in 2013, mostly divided among geo
political borders.

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Future learning the UK Iversity in Germany
[FOREIGN_LANGUAGE] in France, Miranda

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X in Spain, and Portugal, and Latin
America, and EDRAAK in the middle east.

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Now is that the whole picture for MOOCs.

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No, this is only for so called xMOOCs, the
large scale classes.

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In parallel, and even starting in 2008, a

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whole different kind of MOOCs called
cMOOCs was developed.

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The emphasis there was not on the scale,
but

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rather on the c, which stands here for
connectivism.

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I'm utterly unqualified to exactly define
what connectivism is.

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But let me try to pass on my understanding
of it.

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In some ways, C moocs, X moocs, sorry push

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contents to the student, generally in the
form of video.

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I intentionally put the video site above
to emphasize that it flows from

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instructor to students, and that the
students are left on the forum to discuss.

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Connectivism as I understand it highlights
the other direction.

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In a cMooc the instructor should also
actively pool the best content

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and ideas from the students and integrate
it in the course content.

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In fact, this process should be as
decentralized as possible.

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This means that the content aggregation,
production, and integration should also be

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done by the students, that they should get
assistance to help their learning.

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For instance, they should be helped to

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make the important personal connections
with each other.

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So they can build the content
collaboratively.

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They should also be helped to connect with
external sources.

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And, as it's unlikely, that all

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the necessary information resides within
the class.

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So I've now presented to you both cMOOCs
and

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xMOOCs and tried to clarify the
distinction between them.

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Many people try to blend the two models,
taking the best out of both types.

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I find myself that the distinction between
pushing content in

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an xMOOC and pulling ideas in a cMOOC
helps me.

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So that distinction helps me a lot to

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think of MOOCs and where they should be
going.

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