WEBVTT

00:00:00.170 --> 00:00:04.310
In this video, I want to give you a quick
introduction to the history of MOOCs.

00:00:04.310 --> 00:00:07.100
How they came to be, and especially
focusing

00:00:07.100 --> 00:00:09.320
on the mainstream evolution that led to
them.

00:00:11.160 --> 00:00:13.670
For a long while now, many universities
have taped their

00:00:13.670 --> 00:00:17.400
lectures and offered them on private or
public TV channels.

00:00:17.400 --> 00:00:20.760
Some universities were even built around
distance learning.

00:00:20.760 --> 00:00:23.920
For instance, I remember as a kid in the
'80's watching

00:00:23.920 --> 00:00:28.470
on Sunday morning on the BBC Lectures of
the British Open University.

00:00:28.470 --> 00:00:32.009
These lectures were great, and they are
still great fun to watch, if only

00:00:32.009 --> 00:00:34.800
because you could see university
professors wearing

00:00:34.800 --> 00:00:36.530
elephant pants straight out of the '70's.

00:00:38.700 --> 00:00:42.350
Now, in a residential university, the
advantage to taped lectures would be

00:00:42.350 --> 00:00:46.120
that these students can watch a class they
have missed or misunderstood.

00:00:47.530 --> 00:00:50.890
At some point in the 2000s, this
transitioned to the Web.

00:00:50.890 --> 00:00:54.020
Students could know watch classes on
demand with extra convenience.

00:00:55.650 --> 00:00:57.750
But with the transition to the web,
professors

00:00:57.750 --> 00:01:01.480
had now more flexibility and could do
something new.

00:01:01.480 --> 00:01:04.580
They could post handouts on the website,
for instance.

00:01:04.580 --> 00:01:05.880
This is a form of blended learning.

00:01:07.210 --> 00:01:09.990
Or, if they had recorded the lecture one
year,

00:01:09.990 --> 00:01:13.190
say in 2005, in 2006 for the new lecture.

00:01:14.210 --> 00:01:18.330
They could put the old one, the 2005
lecture, online.

00:01:18.330 --> 00:01:19.990
And decide to manage the class time

00:01:19.990 --> 00:01:24.340
differently, in their new, live lecture in
2006.

00:01:24.340 --> 00:01:28.300
Instead of covering that material like
they're always done, they

00:01:28.300 --> 00:01:32.540
could start assuming that the students had
already watched the material.

00:01:32.540 --> 00:01:36.380
And hold more interactive discussions and
challenge the students in class.

00:01:37.450 --> 00:01:41.030
This is called flip teaching where the
goal of the instructor

00:01:41.030 --> 00:01:44.520
is to make face time, with the students
most useful to them.

00:01:44.520 --> 00:01:47.770
To try to engage them in active learning.

00:01:49.380 --> 00:01:52.735
At the same time, if the lectures were
already recorded, it also

00:01:52.735 --> 00:01:57.080
opened up the possibility of sharing all
their material with the world.

00:01:57.080 --> 00:01:57.650
Why not do it?

00:01:58.810 --> 00:02:02.664
This was done by MIT with Open Courseware,
where

00:02:02.664 --> 00:02:07.600
they started to offer freely their regular
lectures online.

00:02:07.600 --> 00:02:09.789
Starting in 2011, it became easier to

00:02:09.789 --> 00:02:13.280
date things, because development vocalized
around Stanford.

00:02:14.470 --> 00:02:17.540
Some professors there realized that their
lectures that were

00:02:17.540 --> 00:02:22.080
available online, for the world, actually
attracted a huge audience.

00:02:22.080 --> 00:02:24.760
In the tens of thousands of students, a
massive scale.

00:02:26.060 --> 00:02:28.360
They decided to create their own startups.

00:02:28.360 --> 00:02:31.210
Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started
Coursera.

00:02:31.210 --> 00:02:33.220
While Sebastian Thrun started Udacity.

00:02:34.430 --> 00:02:36.230
However, unlike Open Coursework.

00:02:37.540 --> 00:02:40.430
This company started offering certificates
and

00:02:40.430 --> 00:02:43.730
raising large levels of venture capital
funding.

00:02:43.730 --> 00:02:45.590
$85 million for Coursera.

00:02:46.780 --> 00:02:51.330
American Universities sense a real threat
there, mostly in a certificate.

00:02:51.330 --> 00:02:53.724
Suddenly, you can buy for hundreds of
dollars and

00:02:53.724 --> 00:02:57.000
hard work, what usually required $40,000
and hard work.

00:02:59.300 --> 00:03:03.000
As a response, Standford started Class to
Go and MIT started EDX.

00:03:04.310 --> 00:03:09.530
EDX was set up as a non profit startup and
quickly Harvard, Berkeley,

00:03:09.530 --> 00:03:13.763
and a bunch of other major schools joined
them on the portal, EDX.org.

00:03:15.230 --> 00:03:19.049
Stanford even decided to drop Class2Go and
work with EDX, because

00:03:19.049 --> 00:03:23.420
their software was open source and
available for anyone to use.

00:03:23.420 --> 00:03:24.880
You can see them at Stanford Online.

00:03:26.610 --> 00:03:30.660
These are Universities that compete on
everything else but there they

00:03:30.660 --> 00:03:34.940
collaborated and injected money at levels
that matched adventure capital fund.

00:03:36.210 --> 00:03:39.160
So, the situation at this stage is that
Coursera is

00:03:39.160 --> 00:03:42.820
the major MOOC portal that has agreement
with around 100 universities.

00:03:44.090 --> 00:03:46.950
Basing them, there is an unusual alliance
of the

00:03:46.950 --> 00:03:51.120
world's most famous universities trying to
contract Coursera's dominance.

00:03:52.660 --> 00:03:55.828
In addition, a bunch of other initiatives
have been

00:03:55.828 --> 00:04:00.640
started in 2013, mostly divided among geo
political borders.

00:04:00.640 --> 00:04:07.078
Future learning the UK Iversity in Germany
[FOREIGN_LANGUAGE] in France, Miranda

00:04:07.078 --> 00:04:12.910
X in Spain, and Portugal, and Latin
America, and EDRAAK in the middle east.

00:04:14.520 --> 00:04:17.238
Now is that the whole picture for MOOCs.

00:04:17.238 --> 00:04:21.519
No, this is only for so called xMOOCs, the
large scale classes.

00:04:22.560 --> 00:04:25.980
In parallel, and even starting in 2008, a

00:04:25.980 --> 00:04:29.760
whole different kind of MOOCs called
cMOOCs was developed.

00:04:29.760 --> 00:04:32.360
The emphasis there was not on the scale,
but

00:04:32.360 --> 00:04:35.229
rather on the c, which stands here for
connectivism.

00:04:36.620 --> 00:04:40.860
I'm utterly unqualified to exactly define
what connectivism is.

00:04:40.860 --> 00:04:42.920
But let me try to pass on my understanding
of it.

00:04:44.000 --> 00:04:48.010
In some ways, C moocs, X moocs, sorry push

00:04:48.010 --> 00:04:50.620
contents to the student, generally in the
form of video.

00:04:50.620 --> 00:04:55.320
I intentionally put the video site above
to emphasize that it flows from

00:04:55.320 --> 00:04:59.430
instructor to students, and that the
students are left on the forum to discuss.

00:05:00.780 --> 00:05:04.970
Connectivism as I understand it highlights
the other direction.

00:05:04.970 --> 00:05:09.600
In a cMooc the instructor should also
actively pool the best content

00:05:09.600 --> 00:05:14.520
and ideas from the students and integrate
it in the course content.

00:05:14.520 --> 00:05:18.590
In fact, this process should be as
decentralized as possible.

00:05:18.590 --> 00:05:22.734
This means that the content aggregation,
production, and integration should also be

00:05:22.734 --> 00:05:27.220
done by the students, that they should get
assistance to help their learning.

00:05:27.220 --> 00:05:28.870
For instance, they should be helped to

00:05:28.870 --> 00:05:31.560
make the important personal connections
with each other.

00:05:31.560 --> 00:05:34.200
So they can build the content
collaboratively.

00:05:34.200 --> 00:05:36.850
They should also be helped to connect with
external sources.

00:05:36.850 --> 00:05:39.200
And, as it's unlikely, that all

00:05:39.200 --> 00:05:41.780
the necessary information resides within
the class.

00:05:43.350 --> 00:05:45.500
So I've now presented to you both cMOOCs
and

00:05:45.500 --> 00:05:48.140
xMOOCs and tried to clarify the
distinction between them.

00:05:49.150 --> 00:05:52.720
Many people try to blend the two models,
taking the best out of both types.

00:05:53.730 --> 00:05:57.942
I find myself that the distinction between
pushing content in

00:05:57.942 --> 00:06:01.530
an xMOOC and pulling ideas in a cMOOC
helps me.

00:06:01.530 --> 00:06:03.150
So that distinction helps me a lot to

00:06:03.150 --> 00:06:05.306
think of MOOCs and where they should be
going.

00:06:05.306 --> 00:06:09.519
[BLANK_AUDIO]