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Table of Contents

Summary

In this wiki page, I introduced shortly what MOOC is and mentioned some types of MOOCs and some other opinions about MOOCs. Some examples and comments are also added. For further researches I referenced some useful webpages.

Introduction

MOOC is acronym of Massive Online Open Course that aims to target a large scale of students. MOOC created opportunity for free online courses for a large number of students. There are two key features of MOOC's which are "Open Access" that no need to pay for fees and "Large Scale" that everybody can attend via the Internet.

According to a blog of someone who is a participant of MOOC education system wrote about MOOCs classifies MOOCs into two types. Those are xMOOCs and cMOOCs. xMOOC Whilst they include discussion forums, and allow people to bounce ideas around and discuss learning together, the centre of the course is the instructor-guided lesson. Each student’s journey/trajectory through the course is linear and based on the absorption and understanding of fixed competencies. Learning is seen as something that can be tested and certified.

cMOOC education system is based on connectivist pedagogy. Connectivism is a theory of learning based on the premise that knowledge exists in the world rather than in the head of an individual.The connected aspect of learning is brought to the fore in a cMOOC. It’s a chaotic experience and is inherently personal and subjective, as participants create their meaning and build and navigate their own web of connections. about MOOCs cMOOCs are discursive communities creating knowledge together. There are four types of activity of cMOOCs. 1. Aggregate, in which students engage with lectures from experts, daily content links provided through a course newsletter, and reading content on the Web. 2. Remix, with students being encouraged to communicate with peers about content and what they are learning, through blogs, discussion boards, or online chat. 3. Repurposing, as students construct or create knowledge. 4. Feed-forward, with students encouraged to publish (and thus share their knowledge) in blogs or other “open” venues.

Almost everyone is curious about what role MOOCs will play in higher education, especially the funding of higher education. There are some MOOC predictions and thoughts that posted on Washington Post.

Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin is teaching a MOOC this semester and blogging about the experience: “After just one week of my course, I’ve seen a lot of learning going on, but it wasn’t in the lectures. Even if I’d been able to see each student watching the lecture, I would not have seen much learning going on, if any. Rather, the learning I saw was on the discussion forums, primarily the ones focused on the assignments I gave out after each lecture. As I explained to the students, the course assignments and the associated forum discussions are the heart of the course.”

Georgetown University Provost Robert Groves blogged: “The ability of massive open online courses to deliver exactly the same experience simultaneously to thousands and thousands of students breaks the mold of traditional university education. We can all see their potential to increase access to education and reduce the costs of education.”

Several TIME magazine staffers have enrolled in MOOCs this semester, including technology writer Harry McCracken who is taking a class through University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. One of his observations: “There are 76,000 people registered for the class, which is more than twice the entire current enrollment for my alma mater, Boston University. Only 13,000 turned in the first written assignment on time. I wonder how many of us will still be at it when the final exam rolls around?”

There are also several questions about how MOOCs make money. That is at some point unrelated with our project but for curious ones http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/11/experts-speculate-possible-business-models-mooc-providers#ixzz2AEv9ZYEl in this site there are some opinions and searhes on it.

I also want to add the basic elements of the MOOCs according to MOOCtalk blog for a general project theme.

  1. Lectures – videos presented by the instructor.
  2. In-lecture quizzes – simple multiple-choice questions that stop the lecture, designed to assist you in pacing and monitoring your progress.
  3. Assignment sheets (one for each lecture) – downloadable PDF files to work through in your own time at your own pace, ideally in collaboration with other students. Not graded.
  4. Problem sets (one a week for weeks 1 through 8) – in-depth problems like those on the assignment, but with a deadline for submitting your answers (in a multiple choice format). Machine graded.
  5. Tutorial sessions – the instructor provides (video) comments and answers to some of the previous week’s assignment problems.
  6. Reading assignments – downloadable PDFs files providing important background information.
  7. Final exam – a downloadable PDF file that you will have one week to complete before participating in a peer review process. Required to be eligible for a grade of completion with distinction.

Lastly, following video that is TedTalk of Salman Khan who is the founder of Khan Academy is very helpful to gain a new perspective for MOOC.

Example Sites

In this part, I gave some site links for a MOOC examples. First one is which sometimes I also used. http://www.openculture.com/. Coursera, Udacity and Edx are most common known MOOC sites we can reach. https://www.coursera.org/; https://www.udacity.com/; https://www.edx.org/.

Further Research Subjects

http://moocguide.wikispaces.com/0.+Home+Intro+to+MOOC this page can be helpful for determining our requirements. There is also a mobile guide part in it.

References

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
  2. http://reflectionsandcontemplations.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/what-is-a-mooc-what-are-the-different-types-of-mooc-xmoocs-and-cmoocs/
  3. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/campus-overload/post/what-in-the-world-is-a-mooc/2012/09/24/50751600-0662-11e2-858a-5311df86ab04_blog.html
  4. http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/29/essay-challenges-posed-moocs-liberal-arts-colleges#ixzz2Dpa6iXuv
  5. http://mooctalk.org/
Comment by project member k.oznuri...@gmail.com, Feb 24, 2013

My searhes about MOOC. I shortly summarized them and added as a wiki page. I hope it will be helpful for our project.

Sincerely.

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