Educational Technology News

"In 2008, massive, open, online courses burst onto the higher education landscape when two Canadian researchers launched a course on the theory of connectivism that enrolled 25 students on the campus of the University of Manitoba and another 2,300 learners worldwide online.

The scalability of MOOCs became clear three years later, when a team of professors at Stanford offered a free online course on artificial intelligence to 160,000 students across the globe. By 2012, three companies — Udacity, Coursera, and edX — were producing MOOCs, and educators began predicting that the online platforms would disrupt the future of higher education."

"When massive open online courses (MOOCs) (re)emerged in 2012 as a popular educational phenomenon, they took the ‘course’ as their base unit. To this day, learning material on edX, Coursera, and FutureLearn is organized, tagged, and searched via course.

Professor Robert Lue, the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, was involved in the creation of edX. He now believes that, for the full potential of MOOCs and open educational resources (OER) to be realized, the reign of the ‘course’ in open education needs to come to an end. The next step, he believes, will be the Blockstore."

"With learners today earning more substantive credentials and, in some cases, academic credits through MOOCs, the authors designed a study to investigate the benefits and costs to learners who are engaging in a series of open, online courses that provide a culminating nondegree credential."

Harvard and MIT experiences suggest a more constrained vision for massive free courses.

"In a shift to Coursera’s offerings, which nearly all are provided in conjunction with HEIs around the world, the US firm will now provide online degrees from institutions as varied and well-known as the University of London, University of Michigan, and Arizona State."