So many questions: how big is a MOOC? what is the importance of a
cohort in a MOOC? what is its optimal time frame? can participants dip
in and dip out? in which case can they dip in and dip out over a
number of years? band together informally in a space that's not called
a MOOC?
What IS a MOOC? (Wikipedians working on that one as we speak)
In one of out EduMOOCasts, Jeff Lebow suggested that perhaps EVO or
Electonic Village Online is a MOOC. It is an ongoing event taking
place each January-February since 2001. It's massive on a scale of
hundreds to thousands, it's open, it's online, and it's a set of
courses. And it rolls over year after year at
http://evosessions.pbworks.com,
but organizationally or logistically, it sustains itself year round as
its coordinators line up mentors prior to the call for moderators, who
then undergo training which is also organized year round, so they can
conduct the sessions in January and February.
I'm starting to think that communities of practice such as
http://webheads.info
could conceivably be construed as a MOOC. This group is also massive
on the scales discussed here (over 1000), it is open, online, and is a
course insofar as its members are constantly learning from one
another, overtly in the case of its weekly online events which have
taken place every Sunday since 1998, and have most recently manifested
themselves in the seminar series archived at
http://learning2gether.posterous.com.
Size is one thing that MOOCs seem to have in common. It has been
pointed out that this is a necessary characteristic, but I've been
experimenting with what I call Miniscule Open Online Courses, which is
where I think that the principles on which MOOCs are based apply to
courses run on a much smaller scale e.g.
http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com.
Some of these characteristics are:
extremely student centered,
highly networked,
course consists of rich content,
facilitators provide coherent PLE,
participants navigate curriculum according to their interest and
individual choices
In recent renditions of the above course, assessment has been by means
of ePortfolios. I think there is an upcoming MOOC being arranged on
that topic, which is a logical accompaniment to MOOCs.
I think these ideas are revolutionizing how we (we in this particular
choir) are thinking about how we might configure and deliver
educational products, but as with most revolutions, the ideas have
been there all along, it's just that now the spark is there, or
connectivity is such that this is now possible on truly massive
scales, and the time is right for many of us to realize that the
people in the next cubicles (or in the ones we've been connecting with
recently) have been mulling these issues in the same way we have for
some time now.
In our most recent EduMOOCast Nellie Deutsch was hypothesizing on what
has given this particular MOOC its legs. She attributes a lot of that
to the relaxed degree of control that the moderators here have been
exercising, but I would say also that the participants in their
present mindset are also more in a position now to take their own
control. There are many experienced MOOCers here, which could not
have been possible with the first one just a couple of years ago, when
the ground rules were only then being formulated.
But that was when this phenomenon was first called a MOOC. Have we in
fact been MOOCing all along?
Vance