READ this blog post.
DO and THINK about the information in the "Learn More About" activities.
LEARN by completing the Hands-On Activities.
Your total time commitment is about 50 minutes.
Introduction to Massive Open Online Courses
A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an online class that is open to anyone who wishes to learn the subject matter.
Distance learning has a longer history than you may realize. In the 1890s, door-to-door salesman promoted correspondence courses, which were accomplished via mail. In 1922, New York University was using radio to broadcast courses for free; students could purchase textbooks, listen to the broadcasts, and mail exam answers to the school. In World War II, films were created as training tools to teach troops important technical knowledge about their equipment. In 1994, the first online seminar was taught by a University of Pennsylvania professor, relying heavily on email.
The MOOC arose from the OER (Online Educational Resources) movement to put more educational resources on the internet for greater accessibility. The first MOOC was offered in 2008 from Athabasca University and taught 25 tuition-paying students alongside 2200 students from the public who took the course for free. MOOCs have since exploded in popularity, with 2012 being called "the year of the MOOC" by the New York Times.
MOOCs have their pros and cons. While MOOCs mean that courses are available to anyone with internet access and a computer, this also means that students must have internet and a computer, plus the digital literacy to go with them. MOOCs would not be an effective way to learn computer skills, because those skills must be mastered before you can enroll in a MOOC. MOOCs can be offered in any language, using any online tools the participants prefer, and they break down the barriers typically presented by working with different institutions, or students participating in different time zones, geographical locations. A MOOC is a less formal environment than the typical classroom (even an online classroom) so it allows for more serendipitous learning from other participants. Instructors usually have to invest their own time, effort, and resources to create new content to set up a new MOOC, but it can boost enrollment to their own universities and colleges if the students taking a course for free enjoy their experience and/or want to pursue their studies further. Finally, MOOCs allow for wider access to education, especially to those who cannot afford a traditional college education, and encourages improvement of lifelong learning skills.
Learning More about Massive Open Online Courses
- Read Massive Open Online Courses at Wikipedia (10 minutes)
- Visit Educause's Massive Open Online Course. Watch the video, MOOC and Beyond (3:43 minutes), then explore some of resources. (25 minutes)
- Browse the list of courses available at Coursera, a popular provider of MOOCs. What classes do you think might interest you? What do you think the benefits of taking these courses as MOOCs - as opposed to taking them as traditional college courses - might be? What might some of the downfalls be?
- Use Coursera to search for MOOCs about arts. Compare the list of results to the list of arts classes available from TCC, as seen in the course catalog here (you will have to scroll down about 10 pages to find the Arts section). What are some of the differences you notice between the offered courses? Similarities?
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