E-learn Weblog of Willem van Valkenburg

The last two weeks multiple articles were published about what MOOCs are and what they are not. Here an overview of some of the interesting reads:

• Debbie Morrisson - MOOC Mythbuster – What MOOCs are and what they aren’t
  there’s been much speculation, misconceptions, exaggerations and misinformation. It’s time to clear the air – in this post Debbie defines what MOOCs are and are not, what the skeptics are saying, and she concludes the post with an attempt to clarify the differences (and similarities), between MOOCs, online courses for credit, and traditional face-to-face courses.
  
  
• Audrey Watters - The Language of MOOCs
  Lately when I write about MOOCs , I feel the need to attach a bunch of adjectives to clarify what I mean by the term: the Stanford-model MOOC. New MOOCs. The OG MOOC. The ur-MOOC. The MOOCs-come-lately. VC MOOCs. Tech MOOCs. Mother of all MOOCs. Change11. DS106.
  
  
• George Siemens - What is the theory that underpins our moocs?
  The MOOCs that we’ve done are defined by a participative pedagogical model. They are unique and different from the emerging elite university MOOC model. There are many points of overlap, obviously, as both our MOOCs and the Coursera/EDx MOOCs taken advantage of distributed networks to reflect changing educational practice.
  
  
• David Wiley - On the Term “MOOC”
  I’ve always passionately hated the MOOC acronym, mostly because of one of the words behind it. There was never anything massive about what we were doing until the Stanford AI class came along. Nothing that has come out of the original group (Wiley, Couros, Downes, Siemens, Cormier, et al.) has approached anything justifying the term “massive.”
  
  
• Oliver Dreon - Ivory towers, fear the MOOC!
  Technology folk love their acronyms.  You have RAM and ROM, DVDs and HD.  You can send a PDF or download a BMP.  Or maybe you want to use HTML to create a website or use a VGA cable to connect a monitor.  But MOOC?  That is probably a new one for most people.  Whether you’re familiar with the term or not, if you work in education, you’ll definitely be affected by the emergence of MOOCs, if not today then someday soon.
  
  
• The Ed Techie - MOOCs Inc
  What we have been witnessing is the mainstreaming of the original MOOC concept.

There are also some interesting posts about experiences people had with MOOcs:

• Sukaina Walji - MOOCing around: reflections on Curt Bonk's MOOC
  There's a lot being written about MOOCs (massively open online courses) at the moment and what they might mean for Higher education or education in general going into the future.
• Chad Black - Attrition and the year of the MOOC
  Like tens of thousands of others, I signed up to take a few of the online course offerings made available through udacity and coursera. And, like tens of thousands of others, I completed nary a one of them.