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Lesson 2 Mooc

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34 views3 pages

Lesson 2 Mooc

Uploaded by

kenjesvll
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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MEDIA AND INFORMATION LITERACY

Lesson 3: Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)

MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSE (MOOC)

Canadian Educators, Stephen Downes and George Siemens, developed an online


course which offered freely available online educational services called Connectivism and
Connective Knowledge in 2008. With this initiative, Massive Open Online Course (MMOC) was
created.

To understand the phenomenon of MOOC, let us define first the words massive, open,
online and course.

MASSIVE refers to the scale of the course and alludes to the large number of learners
who participate in some MOOCs.

OPEN has multiple meanings in relation to MOOCs. It may refer to access; anyone, no
matter his or her background, prior experience or current context may enroll in a
MOOC. Open can also refer to cost; that is, a MOOC is available free of charge. A third
meaning of open relates to the open nature of knowledge acquisition in a MOOC,
including the employment of Open educational resources (OER) or Open Course Ware
(OCW) which is available under a Creative Commons license.

ONLINE means that the courses are offered online, with the access of internet.

COURSE, three criteria must be met for a MOOC to be regarded as a ‘course’: (1) it is
bounded by a start and end date; (2) it is cohered by a common theme or discourse;
and (3) it is a progression of ordered events.

What is MOOC?

Massive Open Online Course is an open access and an interactive way to facilitate
students’ online study. It can provide participants with course materials such as videos, lectures
and study materials. It is primarily an “online course” delivered over the Internet to potentially
an unlimited number of students at a time.

In 2013, University of the Philippines-Open University (UPOU) offered the first MOOC in
the country. This was done after the New York Times named 2012 as “The Year of MOOCs”.
This made more accessible to Filipinos anywhere in the country, even anyone outside the
country, to quality and free education.

Below are the two (2) Kinds of MOOC:

1. The Connectivist MOOC (cMOOC)


2. The Content-based MOOC (xMOOC)

cMOOC xMOOC
Informal learning environment Formal learning environment
Focus is on knowledge creation and Focus is on knowledge duplication
generation
Created by individuals, academics Created by universities and schools
Emphasizes connected and collaborative Emphasizes coordinated assessments and
learning quizzes
Comparatively more learner action Comparatively less learner action
Promotes diversity and collaboration Encourages a huge diversity of applicants

Can you earn a degree by taking an MOOC?

Currently, the answer is no. MOOCs is designed primarily to align the courses to a
college or university. Though not all MOOCs offer academic credit, with easier access to these
educational tools, knowledge is surely be shared freely.

EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit organization composed of IT leaders and professionals,


defines MOOC as “a model for delivering learning content online to any person who wants to
take a course, with no limit on attendance.”

Furthermore, MOOCs can be characterized by the following:

1. A revolutionary approach to education that transitions from physical setting to a


virtual set-up
2. A kind of learning that is facilitated online, breaking the norm of having to
physically go to traditional schools or universities for higher education
3. Utilizes information technologies like analytics to help instructors evaluate their
students’ learning
4. Emphasizes connectedness (Gonzales, 2016)

MOOCs are asynchronous, open-access, Web-based courses geared toward enrolling


hundreds or thousands of students at a time. MOOCs deliver content via recorded video
lectures, online readings, and online assessments, as well as various degrees of student-
student and student-instructor interaction (Kurt, 2018). People enroll in MOOCs for a range of
purposes, including Career development, college preparations, supplemental learning, lifelong
learning, corporate training, and more.

There is a distinction though as to whether an online learning material or program is


considered as a MOOC. Here are a number of features that are typically required for a course
to be considered a MOOC:

1. Massive - It should allow access to a very large number of students, much larger
than a face-to-face class, or a traditional online course. It can even reach up to
500,000 learners or more!
2. Open – It does not have an admission process nor qualifications to be able to
register or enroll. MOOCs being open also means free and open access to
educational resources hosted in varied online places.
3. Online – The course is done remotely via the Internet and does not require
physical attendance at a classroom, which also means that anyone from
anywhere around the world with an Internet connection can avail of these
courses.
4. Courses - It should have learning objectives to be achieved by students after
certain activities within a given period of time.

MOOCs are made and hosted by universities and companies through open enrollment
or open registration. However, most of these institutions do not host MOOCs under their
organization per se but rely on course providers such as Coursera, edX, Udacity, and many
others. They range in length from 1 to 16 weeks (Bowden, 2019). While others run on a
schedule, MOOCs remain flexible, letting you progress through them at your own pace, which
means you are able to study and go through the lessons and activities according to your time,
schedule, and pacing. Like in a traditional classroom, students will also be graded through
quizzes, assignments, or activity. However, these may come as peer review, which is graded by
other students according to a rubric or automatically-marked tests which are graded directly
upon submission.

MOOCs offer a strong starting point for a number of reasons, including:


1. Lack of entry requirements – a MOOC can be taken by anyone who is interested in
the subject matter and able to access the course, regardless of age, background, or
location
2. Repetition – a MOOC will often run two or three times a year, ensuring that students
won’t miss their chance
3. High quality – MOOCs are led by subject matter experts (SMEs) and supported by
teaching assistants so that students have access to first-rate educational resources
4. Feasibility – a MOOC usually necessitates around 1-2 hours of study a week for
about five weeks, making learning doable for students with busy lives
5. Self-paced but supported learning – a MOOC enables students to work through
the course materials and assessments at their own rates while also interacting with a
global learning community (Kurt, 2018).

In sum, MOOCs are a game-changer for higher education. The large scale availability, the
low cost to students, the questions raised around credentialing, and the analytics that MOOCs
provide all create momentum for new pathways to education. Check out an example of a MOOC on
the next page.
Example of a MOOC from course provider edX:

Course Objectives

Host Institution

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