moocs

Last week, Joshua Kim wrote of “Playing the Role of MOOC Skeptic: 7 Concerns” in Inside Higher Ed. Having spent the last year and a half lurking through various MOOCs, I was fascinated by the article. He’s describing something quite foreign to my experience.

It brings to mind Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, a book by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain from the mid-90s. McNeil named punk when he started Punk magazine, which covered an aspect of the NYC music scene in the mid-70s. Through the book’s lens, the Sex Pistols are seen as the end of punk, even though they are popularly considered one of the original punk bands. They put punk in the public eye. The Pistols made headlines, then the public heard the style but they missed the point. ''It was not about being perfect, it was about saying that it was O.K. to be amateurish and funny, that real creativity came out of making a mess, it was about working with what you got in front of you and turning everything embarrassing, awful and stupid in your life to your advantage.'' The first part of that statement could apply the so-called proto-MOOC ds106.

Punk went from being this NYC thing to a label that was apparently applied to almost anything, as this commercial shows. Is the same thing happening with MOOCs? The term MOOC was initially coined for a course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. They opened up their University of Manitoba course on Connectivism to the world through the web, and attracted a couple thousand learners. Connectivism lies at the heart of a MOOC. Learning happens through connecting with ideas and concepts, and connecting with others. The massiveness in the MOOC is not just the sheer number of participants, but the massive interconnection that grows through their reflections, contributions and interactions.

From that viewpoint, it is questionable whether these Stanford/MITx/etc. things are really MOOCs. They seem to me to be more like an evolutionary step up from OERs (Open Educational Resources). Would Thrun’s course have been fundamentally different if only twelve people signed up? Or one, for that matter? Kim writes, “A MOOC, if well designed, can be a terrific method for information transfer, practice and assessment.” But information transfer, practice and assessment do not require massiveness. Thousands of people doing the same thing at the same time does not equal thousands of people doing it together.

We could also question whether these courses really open. They’re open in that anyone can register, but for the most part they’re not open so anyone can look in. The recent course Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success was run through CourseSites, an LMS more appropriately termed byzantine than open.