If you are reading this, you are probably curious about Massive Open Online Courses, also known as MOOCs, a form of distance learning that some say is changing education as we know it.
If you search Google for massive open online courses, you will get a massive number of results: more than two billion articles among Wikipedia, blogs, newspapers, discussion forums, databases . . . . All this content can be overwhelming, especially if you just want to have an overview of how MOOCs function.Even if you are already familiar with MOOCs, we hope this article will help you to better understand the main concepts behind the trend of open courses. There have been some excellent “What is a MOOC” articles already, including the now-classic video by Dave Cormier, who, along with Bryan Alexander, is credited with originally coining and defining the term. But, as Cormier points out himself, the video was created 18 months before the existence of Coursera and Udacity, which have grown to millions of users and hundreds of classes, not to mention that dozens of other platforms and independent classes have also been launched.
So, in the fast-changing field of online education, a useful explanation of MOOCs for a newcomer needs some updating. As editor of this site, Robert has been working with writers, teachers and students from around the world, and Juliana has been writing her thesis for a degree in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. One thing we’ve both learned along the way is that the definition of the term is changing constantly.
But before we get to a definition, let’s spend some time on the history and theory of MOOCs.
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