03 - History of MOOCs [Massive Teaching]

From Week 1 Lecture Videos of "Teaching goes massive: new skills required"
by Paul-Olivier Dehaye
See
https://etherpad.mozilla.org/pr8ZtLXODg
and
http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2014/07/09/congrats-to-paul-olivier-dehaye-massiveteaching/

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.

[BLANK_AUDIO]