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The massive open online course is a response to the challenges faced by
organizations and distributed disciplines in a time of information
overload.
It used to be that when you wanted to know about something you could do a few
things you can ask someone, you could buy a book,
you could try to figure it out for yourself, or you could call a school.
If that's school offered a course in a thing you're trying to figure out you could go
there and take it.
You could get access to information about a topic.
An instructor had combed through journals and books to pull the information together
from a library.
You might even find others who are also interested in the same things you are.
The MOOC is built for a world where information is everywhere, where a social
network obsessed with the same thing that you are is a click away: a digital
world.
A world where internet connection gives you access
to a staggering amount of information.
This video will introduce you to how a Massive Open Online Course is one way of learning
in a networked world.
A MOOC is a course,
it's open, it's participatory, it's distributed
and it supports lifelong networked learning.
In one sense, a Massive Open Online Course is just that: it's of course.
It has facilitators, course materials; it has a start and an end.
It has participants
But a MOOC is not a school,
it's not just an online course
it's a way to connect and collaborate while developing digital skills; it's a way of
engaging in the learning process that engages what it means to be student.
It is,
maybe most importantly, an event around which people who care about a topic can
get together and work and talk about it in a structured way.
But the course is open:
all the work gets done in areas accessible for people to read and
reflect and comment on.
The course is open in the sense that you can go ahead and take the course without
paying for it
- you might pay to get the credit through an institution, but you're not paying for
participating in the course.
It's also open in the sense that the work done in the course is shared between
all the people taking it:
the material put together by the facilitators, the work done by the
participants -
it's all negotiated and in the open.
You get to keep your work
and everybody else gets to learn from it.
The courses participatory:
you really become part of the course by engaging with other people's work.
Participants are not asked to complete specific assignments
but rather to engage with the material, with each other,
and with other material they may find on the Web.
You make connections between ideas,
and between you and other people, in network.
One of the outcomes that people get from the course are the network connections
they built up through engaging with each other.
The course is distributed
and all these blog posts and discussion posts, video responses articles, tweets and tags,
all knit together to create a networked course.
They're mostly not founded in one central location that rather all over the
internet, in different pockets and clusters.
There's no "right way" to do the course, no single path from the first week
to the last.
This allows for new ideas to develop, and for different points of views to
co-exist.
It also means that one of the side- effects of a MOOC is the building of a
distributed knowledge base on the Net.
The course is a step on the road to lifelong learning. MOOCs promote
independence among learners and encourages participants to work in their own spaces
and to create authentic networks that they can easily maintain after the course
finishes.
A MOOC can promote the kind of network creation that lifelong learning is all
about: the course part is just the beginning.
And how can you go about finding one of these?
Well, news that a MOOC will be offered usually spreads on online networks,
people who have reputations for interesting skills or innovative
thinking on a topic decide to collaborate
by offering an open online course covering that topic.
Anyone who wants to join in can.
In a MOOC, you can choose what you do, how you participate,
and only you can tell in the end
if you've been successful
just like real life.