The Massive Open Online Course is a response
to the challenges faced by organizations and distributed disciplines
at a time of information overload.
It used to be that when you want to know about something
You could ask someone, you could buy a book,
you could try to figure it out for yourself, or you could call a school.
If that school offered a course in the thing you are trying to figure out,
you could go there and take it.
You could get access to information about a topic:
an instructor had combed through journals and books
to pull the information together from a library.
You ight even find others who are also interested in the same things that you are.
The MOOC is built for a world where information is everywhere,
where a social network obsessed with the same thing that you are
is a click away, a digital world,
a world where Internet connection
gives you access to a staggering amount of information.
This video will introduce you to how a Massive Open Online Course
is one way of learning in a networked world.
A MOOC is a course. It is open. It is participatory.
It is distributed and it supports life-long networked learning.
In one sense a Massive Open Online Course is just that:
it is a course, it has facilitators and course materials,
it has a start and end date, it has participants.
But a MOOC is not school.
It is not just an online course.
It is a way to connect and collaborate while developing digital skills.
It is a way of engaging in the learning process that engages what it means to be a student.
It is, maybe most importantly, an event around which people who care about a topic
can get together and work and talk about it in a structured way.
The course is open.
All the work gets done in areas accessible
for people to read and reflect and comment on.
The course is open in a sense you can go ahead and take the course without paying for it.
You might pay to get the credit though an institution
but you are not paying for participating in the course.
It is also open, in the sense that the work done in the course
is shared between all the people taking it.
The material put together by the facilitators,
the work done by participants, it is all negotiated in the open.
You get to keep your work and everybody else gets to learn from it.
The course is participatory.
You really become part of the course by engaging with other people's work.
Participants are not asked to complete specific assignments,
but rather to engage with the material, with each other
and with other material they may find on the web.
You make connections between ideas and between you and the other people, you network.
One of the outcomes the people get from the course
are the network connections they build up through engaging with each other.
The course is distributed and all these blog posts and discussion posts, video responses, articles ,tweets , and tags
all knit together to create a networked course.
They're mostly not found in one central location but rather all
over the Internet in different pockets and clusters.
There is no right way to do the course. No single path from the first week to the last.
This allows for new ideas to develop and for different points of views
to co-exist. It also means that one of the side effects of MOOC
is the building of distributed knowledge base on the net.
The course is a step on the road to life long learning.
MOOCs promote independence among learners and encourages participants to work in their
own spaces and to create authentic networks that they can easily maintain after the course finishes. A MOOC can promote
the kind of network creation that life-long learning is all about.
The course part is just the beginning, and how can you go about finding one of these?
Well news that a MOOC will be offered usually spreads on online networks
People have reputation for interesting skills or innovative
thinking on a topic decide to collaborate by offering an open
online course covering that topic. Anyone who wants to join in
can. In a MOOC you can choose what you do,
how you participate, and only you can tell in the end, if you have been successful, just like real life.