Note:  This article is from a series on change with strategic implications for higher education.

• PART I:  HIGHER EDUCATION’S “CROSSROAD”
• PART II:  WHY A MOOC?
• PART III:  BY THE NUMBERS
• PART IV:  ARE DEV CAMPS A SIGN?

Jumping ahead a few decades the impact of a connected world on distance education becomes visible.  First, simply replacing the postal service of my trig experience has enabled more interaction opportunities, such as more assignments and instruction.  Next, opportunities have expanded to include more offerings to a larger audience.  It is not unusual for search results to also return paid placements for online degrees by traditional higher education institutions.  These are, in essence, an opportunity pay a college or university to complete degree requirements remotely.

In the past few years, however, there has been growth in opportunities for anyone to participate in online courses without payment.  Enter the wild frontier era in open teaching and learning involving the “Massive Open Online Course” (MOOC). 

WHY FOLLOW MOOCS?

I suggest two reasons for higher education to follow, or even participate in, the MOOC, despite MOOC’s low completion rates and lack of accreditation, credit, or degree potential.  The first reason is to learn from the successes and failures of this fascinating experiment in teaching with technology.  The second is to reflect on possible higher education paradigms stemming from historical constraints on course offering, size, length, or assessment, for example. 

In particular, I discourage dismissing or ignoring MOOCs.  David Cormier believes some academic negativity may stem from incorrect suggestions the MOOC will replace traditional classrooms, or is superior to resident instruction.

MOOC HISTORY

Wikipedia traces thinking behind the MOOC to a presentation by Buckminster Fuller in 1961.  The term MOOC, however, was coined by Dave Cormier to describe a 2008 course taught by Siemens and Downes.  The “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge” course was offered for credit to twenty-five registered participants, but opened to 2,300 non-credit participants.

MOOC EXPLOSION

New MOOC offerings are announced regularly, often with significant funding, and occasionally with industry partners. 

Players include:

• Udacity (Sebastian Thrun) and Coursera (Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller), both with roots to Stanford faculty
• edX, offered by MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley
• TEDEd, from the TED Talks Conferences
•  University of REDDIT, from  Cond� Nast Publications
•  Khan Academy, started in 2008 by Salman Khan
• Programming Paradigms, from Stanford (Youtube)

POSTSCRIPT

Penn State’s College of Agriculture “invented” correspondence courses in 1892 (i.e., way before the Internet). Penn State’s most celebrated correspondence students are two guys named Ben and Jerry.  By the way, the tradition continues as my current home in the College of IST was recently ranked #1 by the Best Colleges for online IST degree programs.

READINGS

• Cormier, Dave and Siemens, George (2010), Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 45, no. 4 (July/August 2010): 30-39. http://bit.ly/OWzqRy
• What You Need to Know About MOOC’s, The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://bit.ly/S5CJcH