What is a MOOC?

Written and Narrated by Dave Cormier
Video by Neal Gillis

Researchers:
Dave Cormier
Alexander McAuley
George Siemens
Bonnie Stewart

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"

CC-BY 2010

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 that 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 a 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 who have reputationa for interesting skills

or innovative thinking on a topic

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

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

(researchers Daver Cormier Alexander McAuley George Siemens Bonnie Stewart)

(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')

(2010 Creative Commons BY license)