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Massive Open Online Course

BY THATO LEPING

What is MOOC?

• MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course.

• It is free non-degree online courses with open limitless global enrolment to anyone who needs to learn, and regardless of their current educational level.

• It has freely accessible online resources such as video lectures, written materials, and community social. It is free to everybody and it can reach thousands of the students at the same time.

History of MOOC

• The first Mooc was launched in 2008, it was called ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge/2008’ (CCK8), created by educators Stephen Downes and George Siemens.

• Building off a for-credit course at the University of Manitoba, Canada, this was the first class designed behind the acronym of ‘MOOC’ and used many different platforms to engage students with the topic, including Facebook groups, Wiki pages, blogs, forums and other resources.

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• Around 2,200 people signed up for Connectivism and Connective Knowledge/2008, and 170 of them created their own blogs. The course was free and open, which meant that anyone could join, modify or remix the content without paying.

• More than 160,000 students in 190 countries signed up, and for the first time, an open online course was truly ‘massive’. This led Thrun and Norvig to build a new business model for online knowledge, the start-up Udacity.

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• It did not take long until other professors adapted their ideas using own resources. Within one year, two more American start-ups for MOOCs appeared: Coursera and EdX.

• In 2013, the the Open University is building its own MOOC platform, Futurelearn, which will feature universities from the United Kingdom.

• And there are many other independent MOOC initiatives appearing, including Open2Study in Australia and iversity in Germany.

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• These MOOC start-ups might have different goals, but what they have in common is the connection between learners and teachers.

• We’ve come a long ways from the one-way conversation of correspondence courses and educational videocassettes, but whatever is eventually written about the history of MOOCs, academic knowledge will never be seen the same way.

• More and more, knowledge and information can be easily reduced into small bits and rapidly transmitted to anywhere in the world, to anyone

Different types of MOOCs

• There are two types of MOOCKs which are cMOOC and xMOOC.

cMOOCs

• In thinking about the pedagogy involved, cMOOCs tend to focus on constructivist and connectivist approaches to learning.

• Learning happens when students interact with authentic materials, in learner-controlled spaces.

• These learner-controlled spaces often take the form of a personal learning environment, and in such spaces learners choose their connections and sources of materials.

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• cMOOCs encourage active exploration on the part of the learner, sharing with other learners, generating knowledge, and reflecting on learning.

• If one were to compare a cMOOC to an on-campus course, the most similar type of course is the seminar.

• Another interesting note is that the cMOOC, more often than not, tends to be a collaborative effort in design and implementation.

xMOOC

• xMOOCs, up to this time, have tended to focus mostly on instructivist approaches to teaching.

• The instructor, along with a support team, record and serve video lectures to learners.

Field of interest and topics I would pursue in my future MOOC experience• My field of interest is teaching Mathematics.

• The topics I am going to pursue in my future MOOC is Financial Mathematics, Trigonometry and Geometry.

• I chose these topics, because they carry lot of marks and many learners perform badly on them.

• So I hope MOOC will help me to make these topics easily and understood.

REFERENCE

• http://www.mooc-list.com/

• http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/massively-open-online-course-MOOC

• http://www.openculture.com/free_certificate_courses