The Scoop on MOOCs

With the Chronicle of Higher Education’s recent story, “MOOC Mania,” even more people are talking about MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses – and a lot of this dialogue is happening right here on www.hastac.org. Check out the links below for insightful posts on MOOCs and how to use them to revolutionize teaching and learning.

From Cathy Davidson:

• What Is a MOOC?
• What Can MOOCs Teach Us About Learning?
• Don't We Need a Yelp! for MOOC's? Bring on the MOOCE!
• The Humanities and MOOC's of the Future
• Why Have Students Been Left Out of the MOOC Discussion?
• Let's Talk about MOOC (online) Education--And Also About Massively Outdated Traditional Education (MOTEs)

From other HASTAC contributors:

• Petra Dierkes-Thrun: Getting Ready for a Wilde Ride
• Elizabeth Dill: MOOCs: Where are the Librarians?
• Howard Rheingold interviews Jonathan Shaw about Coventry MOOCs

HASTAC recently hosted a forum for Duke scholars to discuss a humanities MOOC with Stanford Professor Petra Dierkes-Thrun, joined by Duke Professors Cathy Davidson and David Bell, co-directors of Duke’s new PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge. Participants live-tweeted the discussion; you can read the exchange on its Storify page.  This was followed by a lecture by Sebastian Thrun, whose AI class at Stanford started the recent MOOC trend by drawing 160,000 students. 

Sebastian now is CEO of Udacity, an online educational provider.  His talk focused on three areas where his work has made a huge difference:  transportation (the driverless car), communication (Google Glasses), and education (MOOCs).  You can read tweets from his talk, compiled into a Storify summary, here: tinyurl.com/8byu7hr.

The MOOC discussion continues around the web:

• On Jan. 2, 2013, Joshua Kim wrote MOOCS, Online Learning, and the Wrong Conversation
• On Dec. 18, 2012, Inside Higher Ed reported on The MOOCs fad and bubble: please tell us another story!
• On Dec. 7, 2012, The Chronicle of Higher Education posted Cathy Davidson's thoughts on the future of higher ed: Size Isn't Everything: For academe's future, think mash-ups not MOOC's
• On Dec. 3, 2012, Andy Oram pointed out that The MOOC movement is not an indicator of educational evolution.
• Clay Shirky published an insightful and often-referenced piece on Napster, Udacity, and the Academy.
• On Nov. 2, 2012, the New York Times reported on The Year of the MOOC and highlighted the big three MOOC providers.
• Cathy's request for a Yelp! for MOOCs has been answered: coursetalk.org/.
• EDUCAUSE has published What Campus Leaders Need to Know About MOOCs.
• Inside Higher Ed has posted many articles about MOOCs, including a piece on the potential for a MOOC to turn a student into a course registrant (with less interaction and less to gain).
• www.moocmooc.com/- Hybrid Pedagogy’s website for their meta-MOOCs, or MOOCs about MOOCs. They held the meta-MOOC in August, and have scheduled a follow-up MOOC on Digital Writing in November.
• Nicholas Carr spoke about The Crisis in Higher Education– and how MOOCs might or might not address it – recently in the Technology Review.
• On Fast Company's blog, Cathy Davidson asked, Why Flip the Classroom When We Can Make It Do Cartwheels?
• Siva Vaidhyanathan asked in the Chronicle of Higher Education, What’s the Matter With MOOCs?
• In the Guardian’s Higher Education Network, Mike Boxall asked, MOOCs: A Massive Opportunity for Higher Education, or Digital Hype?
• At Inside Higher Ed, Paul Fain spoke about Gates, MOOCs, and Remediation
• The Association for Learning Technology reviewed MOOC Pedagogy: The Challenges of Developing for Coursera
• On TED, Daphne Koller spoke about What We're Learning from Online Education
• In Academic Matters: The Journal of Higher Education, Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt wrote about The Massive Online Professor
• And the Wikipedia articleprovides a solid introduction to not only the concept of MOOCs, but the debate surrounding the new possibilities.

Research on MOOCs (courtesy of Wikipedia):

• Babson Survey Research Group: National Reports on Growth of Online Learning in US Higher Education, 2011.
• D. Levy, Lessons Learned from Participating in a Connectivist Massive Online Open Course (MOOC), 2011.
• Dialogue and Connectivism: A New Approach to Understanding and Promoting Dialogue-Rich Networked LearningAndrew Ravenscroft, International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 12.3, March 2011, Learning Technology Research Institute (LTRI), London Metropolitan University, UK.
• R. Kop, The Challenges to Connectivist Learning on Open Online Networks: Learning Experiences During a Massive Open Online Course, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2011.
• T. Walsh, UNLOCKING the GATES: How and Why Leading Universities Are Opening Up Access To Their Courses, Princeton University Press, 2011.
• A. McAuley, B. Stewart, G, Siemens and D. Cormier, The MOOC Model for Digital Practice, 2010.
• S.F. John Mak, R. Williams, and J. Mackness, Blogs and Forums as Communication and Learning Tools in a MOOC, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networked Learning, 2010.
• Siemens, G. Learning and Knowing in Networks: Changing Roles for Educators and Designers. Presented to ITFORUM for Discussion, Jan. 27, 2008.

We’d love for you to add your thoughts on this MOOC movement. What are MOOCs good for? What can they do? What can’t they do? Will they replace a traditional face-to-face university education?   Are they a substitute for a classroom experience? What can we learn from MOOCs about teaching and learning? Are there ways we can enrich and enliven the MOOC experience for those who, perhaps, are unable to attend an actual college in person? Will MOOCs bring down the cost of education? Do they jeopardize tenure, traditional scholarship, and/or the historic role of the university? 

What other questions do we need to be asking of this new form? Your ideas can help us turn “MOOC Mania” into a meaningful conversation about learning online together. 

Image courtesy of stockmedia.cc/stockarch.com.