MOOCs Introduction and Resources

Free Online Enlightenment

If you haven't heard about MOOCs then you are missing out on some great free online courses and the discussion surrounding them.  MOOCs are Massively Open Online Courses and are offered by Ivy league schools, such as Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Massive, because some courses have over 100,000 students signed up at one time!  Coursera, Udacity, and the Academic Room are examples of the major players in the MOOC arena.  You can find the history of MOOCs here. I have signed up for the Udacity CS101 course about creating a search engine.  The subjects offered through MOOCs are numerous and many are using completion of these courses to bolster their resume and make their applications to Ivy league schools more promising.  The delivery methods are great and it is a fantastic opportunity for Instructional Designers to get a free look at how others in the field are creating online courses.  I highly recommend all online instructors and course creators to sign up and take a course!

What MOOCs Will do:

1) Will make the TV show class free to people.

2) It will allow professors and colleges to be better than the history channel at providing knowledge on history and other topics.

3) It will allow some real pedagogical advances, challenging the notion of a 50 minute lecture. While his Coursera segments range from 7 to 15 minutes in length, Struck notes, that “the long narrative arc is sometimes the critical component to convey in my class.”

What MOOCs Won’t do:

1) Won’t revamp higher education as we know it. “I just don’t think that’s in the cards, Struck says.

2) It won’t kill the lecture completely.

3) Won’t democratize knowledge the way some think it will.

What MOOCs Might Do:

1) Expand wisdom.

2) Broaden empathy – understanding of what other people are feeling.

3) I don’t know, if in the aggregate, it will make us smarter.

4) I’m not sure if it will make teaching a more important part of self definition.

5) It might add to the credentialing frenzy of high school students who want to go to a Princeton or University of Pennsylvania, who see MOOC badges as another way to demonstrate their achievement, similar to AP classes.

More Articles about MOOCs:
EdX: Harvard and MIT MOOC
MOOC Skepticism 
How to Create your own MOOC
Using mLearning and MOOCs to Understand Chaos, Emergence, and Complexity in Education

MOOCs: The Prestige Factor