Online Training: What's Up With MOOCs?

by AJ George 

A few weeks ago I talked about online training and posed the question: How big is too big? This week I want to focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). If any training method is too big, certainly it would have to be the one with "Massive" right there in its name, right? Well, maybe not. I've been doing some research and have found that there is a LOT of information floating around out there. I thought it might be useful to bring you a concise shakedown on what's up with all these MOOCs.

First, if you're a video person, check out this video by Neal Gillis in which Dave Comier, one of the people who founded the term MOOC, gives a good explanation.

If you're not a video person, I'll break it down. A MOOC, at its root form, is open to the public and costs nothing. It is catered to those with self-discipline and a desire to learn. There is not necessarily anything special about the content, but in the case of the MOOC, the course content is paced. Reading and topics are partitioned into weeks. You needn't go through all the material, but it's all there and the assumption is that you are self-motivated enough to want to get through it. Then you share your thoughts on the material through blogs and social networks. Ideally everything will be hash-tagged so it can be easily found and shared among participants. Alternatively, student responses will be gathered in a Learning Management System (LMS) where all the participants can access them. In short: A MOOC is a knowledge-base elaborated through chat, completion of assignments, and feedback by a group of self-motivated people who are interested in the topic.

Of course, there's more to MOOCs. If you'd like to dig a bit deeper, here is some further reading. 

MOOCs continue to spread through high-brow institutions:

More Prestigious Colleges Offer Courses Online

And into high schools as well:

University of Miami Offers First Free Online Class to 
High School Students to Prepare for the SAT

Some MOOCs are set up to steer students to paid follow-up courses to receive professional certificates:

eCornell Offers a MOOC that Steers Students to a Paid Follow-Up

Harvard Law School is chucking out the "M" for "Massive" in its Copyright MOOC, and allowing only 500 students (as opposed to the 100,000 who were in Harvard's first MOOC offering): 

Should All Massive Open Online Courses Follow Harvard Law School's Move By Limiting Class Size?

And while we're at it, how big is too big for online training classes in general?

Online Training: How Big is Too Big?

Are MOOCs breeding grounds for cheaters? Does it matter?

Dozens of Plagiarism Incidents Are Reported in Coursera's Free Online Courses

Running your own MOOC? Here's how to manage it: 

Managing High-Enrollment Online Courses

Some fear the push for MOOCs will not lead to the edu-topia we all dream of (don't we?), but instead an industry led by venture capitalists that is neither free nor innovative: 

Size Isn't Everything: For academe's future, think mash-ups not MOOC's

And maybe that time is already here, as some places are already offering pared down versions of their courses, marketing them as similar to MOOCs, and charging money (but also giving credit) for them: 

"MOOCs" for Credit Come to California

So there you have it. If you're not all MOOCed out, I'd love to read your comments. Have you participated in a MOOC? Are you thinking about it? Is this a fad? Will they be able to keep this free and innovative? Would you argue that it's not innovative at all?

Comments

[Jeff Walter]

Thank you for introducing me to the concept of MOOCs. Crowdsourcing in the education sector is definitely a disruptive technology and it will be interesting to see how the industry evolves over the next decade. This article was good food for thought so I sent a link to it to our 2,500 LMS administrators.