Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are so endearingly called, are courses which allow large-scale participation in online courses that do not typically award college credit for the students who take them. It's so relevant to self-directed learning because the students who sign up for them (and there are TONS of students who sign up), aren't paying for the course, aren't getting any sort of credit or credential for them, they just want to know what's going on in the subject. If that isn't self-directed, I don't know what is. Here are a few resources that will help you learn more about MOOCs:
Wikipedia Definition
New England Journal of Higher Education
Irrational Exuberance - Washington Post
Interestingly, I recently read an article in The Wired Campus blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education about a MOOC gone wrong! The headline read,"Georgia Tech and Coursera Try to Recover From MOOC Stumble." There were close to 40,000 people enrolled in the online course designed to teach others how to run an online course successfully. The first line of the article reads, "When Fatimah Wirth decided to teach a massive open online course about how to run a virtual classroom successfully, she did not expect it to turn into a case study for the opposite."
ReplyDeleteMy opinion is that many students can be self-directed learners, but this does not minimize the importance of quality instruction. It seems 40,000 people are just a few too many to serve successfully.
Resources:
Kolowich, S., (2013, Feb. 4). Georgia Tech and Coursera Try to Recover From MOOC Stumble. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/georgia-tech-and-coursera-try-to-recover-from-mooc-stumble/42167?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=linkedin&goback=%2Egde_2200626_member_212068362