LEARNER EXPERIENCE IN MOOCS
This is my assignment for activity 14 of the Open University’s ‘Open Education (#h817open) course in which I look at how MOOCS have been defined and compare the Direct Storytelling courses (ds106) with those provided by Coursera.
DEFINING MOOCS
The MOOC acronym was coined in 2007 by David Cormier and Bryan Alexander to describe the University of Manitoba course ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’. This attracted less than 3,000 students so was, by some degree, less massive than more recent online courses.
Some have argued that the monolithic nature of MOOCs now depersonalises them to the point that they can only pay lip service to the principle of ‘connectivity’ and makes the use of the adjective ‘open’ a bone of contention.
An example of the backlash can be found in Reclaim Open Learning, a network which prefers to talk in terms of “small pieces, loosely joined’ rather than an unwieldy and impenetrable mass of resources.
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I used to work for a man who was a stickler for correctness. From handling requests for time off to responding to an official complaint from a member of parliament everything had to be done exactly by the book.
