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The Massive Open Online Course is a response

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to the challenges faced by organizations and distributed disciplines

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at a time of information overload.

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It used to be that when you want to know about something

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You could ask someone, you could buy a book,

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you could try to figure it out for yourself, or you could call a school.

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If that school offered a course in the thing you are trying to figure out,

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you could go there and take it.

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You could get access to information about a topic:

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an instructor had combed through journals and books

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to pull the information together from a library.

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You ight even find others who are also interested in the same things that you are.

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The MOOC is built for a world where information is everywhere,

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where a social network obsessed with the same thing that you are

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is a click away, a digital world,

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a world where Internet connection

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gives you access to a staggering amount of information.

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This video will introduce you to how a Massive Open Online Course

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is one way of learning in a networked world.

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A MOOC is a course. It is open. It is participatory.

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It is distributed and it supports life-long networked learning.

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In one sense a Massive Open Online Course is just that:

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it is a course, it has facilitators and course materials,

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it has a start and end date, it has participants.

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But a MOOC is not school.

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It is not just an online course.

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It is a way to connect and collaborate while developing digital skills.

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It is a way of engaging in the learning process that engages what it means to be a student.

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It is, maybe most importantly, an event around which people who care about a topic

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can get together and work and talk about it in a structured way.

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The course is open.

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All the work gets done in areas accessible

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for people to read and reflect and comment on.

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The course is open in a sense you can go ahead and take the course without paying for it.

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You might pay to get the credit though an institution

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but you are not paying for participating in the course.

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It is also open, in the sense that the work done in the course

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is shared between all the people taking it.

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The material put together by the facilitators,

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the work done by participants, it is all negotiated in the open.

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You get to keep your work and everybody else gets to learn from it.

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The course is participatory.

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You really become part of the course by engaging with other people's work.

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Participants are not asked to complete specific assignments,

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but rather to engage with the material, with each other

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and with other material they may find on the web.

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You make connections between ideas

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and between you and the other people, you network.

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One of the outcomes that people get from the course

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are the network connections they build up through engaging with each other.

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The course is distributed and all these blog posts and discussion posts,

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video responses, articles, tweets and tags

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all knit together to create a networked course.

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They're mostly not found in one central location

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but rather all over the Internet in different pockets and clusters.

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There is no right way to do the course,

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no single path from the first week to the last.

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This allows for new ideas to develop

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and for different points of views to co-exist.

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It also means that one of the side effects of a MOOC

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is the building of distributed knowledge base on the Net.

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The course is a step on the road to life-long learning.

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MOOCs promote independence among learners

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and encourages participants to work in their own spaces

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and to create authentic networks that they can easily maintain after the course finishes.

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A MOOC can promote the kind of network creation that life-long learning is all about.

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The course part is just the beginning, and how can you go about finding one of these?

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Well news that a MOOC will be offered usually spreads on online networks

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People who have reputationa for interesting skills

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or innovative thinking on a topic

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decide to collaborate by offering an open online course covering their topic.

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Anyone who wants to join in can.

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In a MOOC you can choose what you do, how you participate,

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and only you can tell in the end, if you have been successful, just like real life.

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(written and narrated by Dave Cormier
video by Neal Gillis)

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(researchers Daver Cormier Alexander McAuley George Siemens Bonnie Stewart)

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(Created through funding received by the University of Prince Edward Island through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's 'Knowledge Synthesis Grants on the Digital Economy')

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(2010 Creative Commons BY license)