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

when you want to know about something you could do a few things. You could ask someone

You could buy a book you could figure it out for yourself or

you could call a school if that school offer that course

in the things you are trying to figure it out you can go and take it

You can get access to the information about the topic and an instructor had comb

to journals and books

to pull the information together from library. you may even find

others who are although interested in the same interest as you are.

The Mooc is build for a world where information id everywhere.

where the social network is obsessed with the same thing you are

a click away a digital world. A world were internet connection

get you access to a staggering amount of information

this video will introduce you to how massive open online courses

is one way of learning in a network world.

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

It is distributed and it supports life long learning

In one sense a massive open online course is

just that. It is a course. It has a facilitator, course materials,

it has start and end dates. 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

the way engaging in the learning process that engages what it means to be a student

It is maybe most importantly an event around which people get around a topic

and 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 for 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 participators.It is all negotiated and 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 in a network

where the outcomes the people get from the course and 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 buckets and clusters.

There is no right way to do the course. No single bath from the first tweet to the last

This allows for new ideas to develop and for different points of view

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

MOOC promote independence among learners and encourage participants to work on their

own spaces and to create authentic networks that can easily maintain after the course finishes. A MOOC can promote

kind of network creation that life-long learning is all about.

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

Well news that 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.