Massive Open Online

Courses(MOOCs)

Prepared by :

Dr. Manisha Rani

Assistant Professor in Department of Educational
studies ,Mahatma Gandhi Central University , Motihari,
Bihar.
 LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Define the MOOCs.

Differentiate between various kinds of MOOCs .

List the MOOCs preparing universities, companies and organisations

Know the MOOCs providing platforms

Understand the application of MOOCs.

List the advantage and disadvantage of MOOCs.

 MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSES (MOOCS)

• The word MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier, from the
University of Prince Edward Island for a course offered by the
University of Manitoba, "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge."

• The course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge developed

by Stephen Downes and George Siemens .
 CHARACTERISTICS
-
Bates (2015)
• specifies the essential elements behind each acronym of MOOC. Common in these
definitions are the following aspects to give meaning to the elements of a MOOC:

• Massive: designed for unlimited number of participants. This means that the course is
designed such that the efforts of all services does not increase significantly as the
number of participants increases.

• Open: access to the course is free without entry qualifications.

• Online: the full course is available through the internet.

• Course: the offering is a course, meaning that it offers a complete learning experience,
i.e. structured around a set of learning goals in a defined area of study and includes
the course materials, quizzes, feedback, examination and certificate of completion.
 Continued…

Source: Matthew Plourde (licensed CC-BY-ND ) originally

published with the subtitle “Every Letter is Negotiable”
 DEFINITIONS
• According to the commonwealth of learning 2015 “A MOOC is an online
course that requires no prior qualifications for entry, can be accessed by anyone
who has an Internet connection, and includes large or very large numbers of
learners”.

• A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at large-scale

interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional
course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide
interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors,
and teaching assistants (TAs). MOOCs are a recent development in distance
education
 TYPES

• xMOOCs - stands for eXtended Massive Open Online Courses which are based on
traditional course structures and make use of established teaching approaches and
materials. Students will observe pre-recorded lectures, complete required readings, and
participate in discussions as produced and curated by the course instructor or an
instructional team from a higher education institution. It follows the behavioristics
approach of learning .

• cMOOCs - ‘c’ in cMOOC stands for connectivist, which represents the nature of cMOOC
and based on connectivist learning models that privilege collaboration as a form of active
learning. Students in a cMOOC will work together to locate, evaluate, and contribute
course content, uploading materials (tweets, blog posts, blogs, wikis, etc.) to the course
using the learning platform.
PREPARATION OF MOOCs

Some MOOCs
are prepared by universities-
example-Stanford, MIT, Harvard etc.

Some MOOCs
are prepared by companies-example-
Microsoft ,Google etc.

Some MOOCs
are prepared by organisations-example-
IEEE, Linux foundation etc.
 MOOCs PROVIDERS

However universities plays important role in creating MOOCs but they rarely
provide MOOCs themselves. Instead, they depend on course providers such as:
• Coursera
• edX
• FutureLearn
• Udacity
• NovoEd
• Iversity etc.
students can go through these platforms or others for taking MOOCs .
• Coursera- work with universities and organisations to provide courses in
physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, digital marketing, data science,
mathematics, business, social-sciences, among others.

• edX-Created in 2012 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard

University it is a massive MOOC provider and different from other providers as it
is a non-profit organization and runs on the Open edX open-source software. It
has over 7 million students taking over 700 different online courses.

• Future Learn- launched and wholly owned by The Open University in Milton
Keynes, England was founded in December 2012. As on January 2017 it has 109
UK and international partners and also includes non-university partners such as
the British Museum, European Space Agency, the British Council, UCAS, UNESCO,
Cancer Research UK, the National Film and Television School.
• Udacity- founded by Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike Sokolsky and is a for profit
organization offering MOOCs. Originally focused on offering university style courses but now
focuses on vocational courses for professionals.

• NovoEd- founded by Stanford University professor Amin Saberi and PhD student Farnaz
Ronaghi, it partners with universities, foundations, and corporations to offer massive open
online courses (MOOCs) as well as small private online courses (SPOCS).

• Iversity:-A European online education platform that provides free courses for anyone to
enrol and participate.
 INDIAN PLATFORMS FOR MOOCs
• SWAYAM -Stands for Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds. It is an India
Chapter of Massive Open Online Courses, indigenously developed IT platform, initiated by
Government of India, which is instrumental for self-actualization providing opportunities for
a life-long learning. It is an integrated MOOCs platform for distance education that is aimed
at offering all the courses from school level (Class IX) to post-graduation level. SWAYAM was
developed in 2014, collaboratively by MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development)
and AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) with the help of Microsoft and is
capable of hosting 2,000 courses.

• NPTEL- is an acronym for National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning which is

an initiative by seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur,
Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for creating online
course contents in engineering and science. It is a project funded by the Ministry of Human
Resource Development (MHRD) and contents for the courses were based on the model
curriculum suggested by All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the syllabi of
major affiliating Universities in India.
• mooKIT- is a light-weight MOOC Management System like EdX which is conceived, designed
and developed at IIT Kanpur to deliver and manage a course online. mooKIT Management
System has been built ground up at the Computer Science department at IIT Kanpur with bestof-
breed features and state-of-art technology.
• ITBX- is MOOC platform developed by IIT Bombay through significant customization of open
edX code base. IITBX platform is an integration of Drupal 8 with Open edX. The courses are
offered using Open edX, while Drupal is used to fetch and display courses in various ways. This
platform has been created for learners including academicians, students, researchers,
professionals, administrative staff, and novice users, including educationally, socially,
economically, physically disadvantaged groups or others that seek to transform themselves
through cutting-edge technologies, innovative pedagogy, and rigorous courses.
• IIMBx -is a MOOC founded on the philosophy that management education has strong potential to
transform our educational systems and that high quality education must be available to all
unconstrained by limitations imposed by location, finances or prior educational background
 APPLICATIONS OF MOOCS
• Professional development
• Skill development
• Faculty development—fostering soft skills , inculcating research etc.
• Development of knowledge.
 ADVANTAGES OF MOOCs
MOOCs:

• Are free of cost- Right now, most MOOCs are free or almost free . This is likely to
change as universities look for ways to defray the high cost of creating MOOCs.
• Provide a solution to overcrowding-According to Heller, 85% of California's
community colleges have course waiting lists. A bill in the California Senate seeks to
require the state’s public colleges to give credit for approved online courses.
• Force professors to improve lectures.-Because the best MOOCs are short, usually an
hour at the most, addressing a single topic, professors are forced to examine every bit of
material as well as their teaching methods.
• Create a dynamic archive- That's what Gregory Nagy, professor of classical Greek
literature at Harvard, calls it. Actors, musicians, and stand-up comedians record their
best performances for broadcast and posterity, Heller writes; why shouldn't college
teachers do the same? He cites Vladimir Nabokov as once suggesting "that his lessons at
Cornell be recorded and played each term, freeing him for other activities."
• Are designed to ensure that students’ progress-MOOCs are real college courses, complete with tests
and grades. They are filled with multiple choice questions and discussions that test comprehension.
Nagy sees these questions as almost as good as essays because, as Heller writes, "the online testing
mechanism explains the right response when students miss an answer, and it lets them see the
reasoning behind the correct choice when they're right."The online testing process helped Nagy
redesign his classroom course. He told Heller, "Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard
experience now closer to the MOOC experience.“

• Bring people together from all over the world- Heller quotes Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard president,
regarding her thoughts on a new MOOC, Science & Cooking, that teaches chemistry and physics in the
kitchen, "I just have the vision in my mind of people cooking all over the globe together. It’s kind of
nice.“

• Allow teachers to make the most of classroom time in blended classes- In what is called a "flipped
classroom," teachers send students home with assignments to listen to or watch a recorded lecture, or
read it, and return to the classroom for more valuable discussion time or other interactive learning.

• Offer interesting business opportunities-Several new MOOC companies launched in 2012: edX by
Harvard and MIT; Coursera, a Standford company; and Udacity, which focuses on science and tech.
 DISADVANTAGES
MOOCs:
1.Could cause teachers to become nothing more than "glorified teaching assistants”: Heller
writes that Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard justice professor, wrote in a letter of protest, "The thought
of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the
country is downright scary.“
2.Make discussion a challenge: It’s impossible to facilitatemeaningful conversation in a
classroom with 150,000 students. There are electronic alternatives: message boards, forums, chat
rooms, etc., but the intimacy of face-to-face communication is lost, emotions often
misunderstood. This is a particular challenge for humanities courses. Heller writes, "When three
great scholars teach a poem in three ways, it isn't inefficiency. It is the premise on which all
humanistic inquiry is based”.
3.Grading papers is impossible. Even with the help of graduate students, grading tens of
thousands of essays or research papers is daunting, to say the least. Heller reports that edX is
developing software to grade papers, software that gives students immediate feedback, allowing
them to make revisions. Harvard's Faust isn't completely on board. Heller quotes her as saying, "I
think they are ill-equipped to consider irony, elegance, and…I don’t know how you get a computer
to decide if there’s something there it hasn’t been programmed to see.“
4.Make it easier for students to drop out: Heller reports that when MOOCs are strictly online,
not a blended experience with some classroom time, "dropout rates are typically more than
90%”.

5.Intellectual property and financial details are issues: Who owns an online course when
the professor who creates it moves to another university? Who gets paid for teaching and/or
creating online courses? These are issues that MOOC companies will need to work out in the
upcoming years.

6.Miss the magic: Peter J. Burgard is a professor of German at Harvard. He has decided not to
participate in online courses because he believes the "college experience" comes from sitting in
preferably small groups having genuine human interactions, "really digging into and exploring
a knotty topic—a difficult image, a fascinating text, whatever. That's exciting. There’s a
chemistry to it that simply cannot be replicated online.“
7.Will shrink faculties, eventually eliminating them: Heller writes that Burgard
sees MOOCs as destroyers of traditional higher education. Who needs professors
when a school can hire an adjunct to manage a MOOC class? Fewer professors will
mean fewer Ph.D.s granted, smaller graduate programs, fewer fields, and subfields
taught, the eventual death of entire "bodies of knowledge." David W. Wills,
professor of religious history at Amherst, agrees with Burgard. Heller writes that
Wills worries about "academia falling under hierarchical thrall to a few star
professors." He quotes Wills, "It's like higher education has discovered the
megachurch."
 SELF ASSESSMENT

• What is the full form of MOOC?

• Who coined the term MOOC?
• What are the various kinds of MOOCs?
• Mention the advantage and disadvantage of MOOCs.
 REFERENCES
• Yuan, L., Powell, S., & CETIS, J. (2013). MOOCs and open
education: Implications for higher education.
• Haumin, Lun. and Madhusudan ,Margam.(2019) .An Indian
Based MOOC: An Overview. Library Philosophy and Practice
(e-journal) Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• https://www.techopedia.com/definition/29260/massive-open-
online-course-mooc
• https://bizmooc.eu/papers/about-moocs/?print=pdf
• https://www.thoughtco.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-moocs-
• https://educationaltechnology.net/massive-open-online-
courses-moocs-definitions/
• http://desarrolloweb.dlsi.ua.es/moocs/what-is-a
• moochttps://bizmooc.eu/papers/about-moocs/