In this video, I want to give you a quick introduction to the history of MOOCs.
How they came to be, and especially focusing
on the mainstream evolution that led to them.
For a long while now, many universities have taped their
lectures and offered them on private or public TV channels.
Some universities were even built around distance learning.
For instance, I remember as a kid in the '80's watching
on Sunday morning on the BBC Lectures of the British Open University.
These lectures were great, and they are still great fun to watch, if only
because you could see university professors wearing
elephant pants straight out of the '70's.
Now, in a residential university, the advantage to taped lectures would be
that these students can watch a class they have missed or misunderstood.
At some point in the 2000s, this transitioned to the Web.
Students could know watch classes on demand with extra convenience.
But with the transition to the web, professors
had now more flexibility and could do something new.
They could post handouts on the website, for instance.
This is a form of blended learning.
Or, if they had recorded the lecture one year,
say in 2005, in 2006 for the new lecture.
They could put the old one, the 2005 lecture, online.
And decide to manage the class time
differently, in their new, live lecture in 2006.
Instead of covering that material like they're always done, they
could start assuming that the students had already watched the material.
And hold more interactive discussions and challenge the students in class.
This is called flip teaching where the goal of the instructor
is to make face time, with the students most useful to them.
To try to engage them in active learning.
At the same time, if the lectures were already recorded, it also
opened up the possibility of sharing all their material with the world.
Why not do it?
This was done by MIT with Open Courseware, where
they started to offer freely their regular lectures online.
Starting in 2011, it became easier to
date things, because development vocalized around Stanford.
Some professors there realized that their lectures that were
available online, for the world, actually attracted a huge audience.
In the tens of thousands of students, a massive scale.
They decided to create their own startups.
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started Coursera.
While Sebastian Thrun started Udacity.
However, unlike Open Coursework.
This company started offering certificates and
raising large levels of venture capital funding.
$85 million for Coursera.
American Universities sense a real threat there, mostly in a certificate.
Suddenly, you can buy for hundreds of dollars and
hard work, what usually required $40,000 and hard work.
As a response, Standford started Class to Go and MIT started EDX.
EDX was set up as a non profit startup and quickly Harvard, Berkeley,
and a bunch of other major schools joined them on the portal, EDX.org.
Stanford even decided to drop Class2Go and work with EDX, because
their software was open source and available for anyone to use.
You can see them at Stanford Online.
These are Universities that compete on everything else but there they
collaborated and injected money at levels that matched adventure capital fund.
So, the situation at this stage is that Coursera is
the major MOOC portal that has agreement with around 100 universities.
Basing them, there is an unusual alliance of the
world's most famous universities trying to contract Coursera's dominance.
In addition, a bunch of other initiatives have been
started in 2013, mostly divided among geo political borders.
Future learning the UK Iversity in Germany [FOREIGN_LANGUAGE] in France, Miranda
X in Spain, and Portugal, and Latin America, and EDRAAK in the middle east.
Now is that the whole picture for MOOCs.
No, this is only for so called xMOOCs, the large scale classes.
In parallel, and even starting in 2008, a
whole different kind of MOOCs called cMOOCs was developed.
The emphasis there was not on the scale, but
rather on the c, which stands here for connectivism.
I'm utterly unqualified to exactly define what connectivism is.
But let me try to pass on my understanding of it.
In some ways, C moocs, X moocs, sorry push
contents to the student, generally in the form of video.
I intentionally put the video site above to emphasize that it flows from
instructor to students, and that the students are left on the forum to discuss.
Connectivism as I understand it highlights the other direction.
In a cMooc the instructor should also actively pool the best content
and ideas from the students and integrate it in the course content.
In fact, this process should be as decentralized as possible.
This means that the content aggregation, production, and integration should also be
done by the students, that they should get assistance to help their learning.
For instance, they should be helped to
make the important personal connections with each other.
So they can build the content collaboratively.
They should also be helped to connect with external sources.
And, as it's unlikely, that all
the necessary information resides within the class.
So I've now presented to you both cMOOCs and
xMOOCs and tried to clarify the distinction between them.
Many people try to blend the two models, taking the best out of both types.
I find myself that the distinction between pushing content in
an xMOOC and pulling ideas in a cMOOC helps me.
So that distinction helps me a lot to
think of MOOCs and where they should be going.
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