Abstract
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are offered online to anyone who registers. There are no requirements to register and for those not wishing to receive course credit or a certificate indicating successful completion, there are no charges to enroll. As a result, enrollments can reach into the thousands. MOOCs are a recent twenty-first century phenomenon that emerged from the open educational resources movement and a course entitled “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” offered in 2008 by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. There were a small number of students at the University of Manitoba who paid tuition and several thousand others who simply participated in the online course environment at no cost. Given the subject (connectivism) of that early MOOC and the fact that those not paying were there as part of an extended community gathered around the subject of the course, it is reasonable to conclude that the ‘C’ in MOOC stood for ‘course’ for registered participants and ‘community’ for those not registered. Since 2008, MOOCs have appeared in many places and have taken many forms. This chapter examines the growth of MOOCs and the roles that they can play in the context of learning and instruction. The argument herein is that it is a mistake to consider current MOOCs to be a new form of a distance learning course. Rather, current MOOCs should be viewed and evaluated not as courses but as communities of subject-specific participants.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Baker, E. (2007). 2007 Presidential address: The end(s) of testing. Educational Researcher, 36(6), 309–317. Retrieved from http://edr.sagepub.com/content/36/6/309.abstract
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York, NY: Kappa Delta Pi.
Dillenbourg, P. (Ed.). (1999). Collaborative learning: Cognitive and computational approaches. Oxford, UK: Elsevier.
Downes, S. (2005). An introduction to connective knowledge. In T. Hughes (Ed.), Media, knowledge & education: Exploring new spaces, relations, and dynamics in digital media ecologies. Retrieved from http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034
Downes, S. (2008). CCK08—The distributed course. The MOOC guide. Retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/3-cck08—the-distributed-course
Graf, S., & Kinshuk (2009). An approach for dynamic student modelling of learning styles. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Exploratory Learning in Digital Age (CELDA 2009) (pp. 462–465). Rome, Italy: IADIS press.
Hofstadter, D. R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid. New York: Basic Books.
Johnstone, S. M. (2005). Open educational resources serve the world. Educause Quarterly 3, 15–18. Retrieved from https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0533.pdf
Kinshuk, & Lin, T. (2004). Cognitive profiling towards formal adaptive technologies in webbased learning communities. International Journal of WWW-based Communities, 1(1), 103–108.
Larson, M., & Lockee, B. B. (2014). Streamlined ID: A practical guide to instructional design. New York: Routledge.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Mason, J. (2011, August). 70,000 students flock to free online course in artificial intelligence. Scientific American Blog Network, August 16, 2011. Retrieved from http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/stanford-artificial-intelligence/
Martindale, T. (2015). Massive open online courses. In J. M. Spector (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational technology (pp. 486–488). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Merrill, M. D. (2013). First principles of instruction: Identifying and designing effective, efficient and engaging instruction. San Francisco: Wiley.
Palinscar, A. S. (1998). Social constructivist perspectives on teaching and learning. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 345–375.
Ross, J., Sinclair, C., Knox, J., Bayne, S., & Macleod, H. (2014). Teacher experiences and academic identity: The missing components of MOOC pedagogy. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(1), 56–68.
Rau, W., & Heyl, B. S. (1990). Humanizing the college classroom: collaborative learning and social organization. Teaching Sociology, 18, 141–155.
Salomon, G. (Ed.). (1993). Distributed cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 3–10.
Sparks, S. D. (2011, September). Schools ‘flip’ for lesson model promoted by Khan Academy. Education Week, September 28, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/28/05khan_ep.h31.html
Spector, J. M. (2013). Emerging educational technologies and research directions. Educational Technology & Society, 16(2), 21–30.
Spector, J. M. (2014a). Program and project evaluation. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. Elen, & M. J. Bishop (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (4th ed., pp. 195–201). New York: Springer.
Spector, J. M. (2014b). Remarks on MOOCs and mini-MOOCs. Educational Technology Research and Development, 62(3), 385–392.
Spector, J. M. (2016). Foundations of educational technology: Integrative approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Spector, J. M., Merrill, M. D., Elen, J., & Bishop, M. J. (Eds.). (2013). Handbook of research on educational communications and technology. New York: Springer.
Spector, J. M., Johnson, T. E., & Young, P. A. (2014). An editorial on research and development in and with educational technology. Educational Technology Research and Development, 62(1), 1–12.
Woolf, B. P. (Ed.) (2010). A roadmap for education technology [National Science Foundation Grant #0637190]. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society (Trans. A. Blulnden & N. Schmolze). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Acknowledgments
This paper is a follow-on to one published in Educational Technology Resesearch & Development (Spector 2014b). While the basic substance is similar, there is more emphasis here on how and why MOOCs should evolve to include components found in the for-credit courses offered at the same institution or, as an alternative, simply become large communities of interest.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Michael Spector, J. (2017). A Critical Look at MOOCs. In: Jemni, M., Kinshuk, Khribi, M. (eds) Open Education: from OERs to MOOCs. Lecture Notes in Educational Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-52925-6_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-52925-6_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-52923-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-52925-6
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)