Molly Hale's List: Week One Connectivist MOOC

• A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course. It is a gathering of participants, of people willing to jointly exchange knowledge and experiences for each of them to build upon. As such it is within the hands of the participants and organizers of a MOOC to change it to their needs. This allows them to use the information and to construct their own ideas or projects.

• Be Warned!

    The effect of a MOOC is not to be taken lightly! Many of the participants who went through a MOOC experience have had a powerful learning experience which in some cases resulted in strong personal or professional projects with impact. On the other hand the drop-out rate in a non-credited MOOC is high and some participants simply do not like the approach of a MOOC for it has specific dynamics. The diversity in appreciations and feelings is not new: the playground felt like a mental warzone to some and a great adventure to others.

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• For one, dropout rates for MOOCs are exceptionally high. Dr. Siemens estimates that about 10 percent of registrants in his MOOCs (albeit smaller versions of the high-profile U.S. type) complete the course. Coursera’s Dr. Ng gives figures that are in the same ballpark: of 104,000 students who enrolled in his online machine-learning class last year (an earlier iteration of the Coursera version), 46,000 submitted at least one homework assignment, 20,000 completed a substantial portion of the course and 13,000, or 12.5 percent, passed.
• Another issue is that the technology used to deliver MOOCs is underdeveloped and isn’t as user friendly as it needs to be, although this could change quickly now that edX has pledged to make its platform available free of charge.
• “When you have several hundred or several thousand students you have different opportunities for peer learning than what exists in a course for 30 people,” says Dr. Siemens. The larger group instinctively clusters into smaller subgroups bound by similar educational backgrounds, research interests or geographic proximity.

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• A massive open online course (MOOC) is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOCs are a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources.

• While there is no commonly accepted definition of a MOOC, two key features seem prevalent:

   
   
  • Open access. MOOC participants do not need to be a registered student in a school to "take" a MOOC, and are not required to pay a fee.
   
  • Scalability. Many traditional courses depend upon a small ratio of students to teacher, but the "massive" in MOOC suggests that the course is designed to support an indefinite number of participants.