Today in my email I got my OLDaily newsletter from Stephen Downes. As always I gave it a quick scan to see what was being said in the world of open education today. It seems that often there is something about MOOC's. What they are or what they are not. How someone is experimenting with some version of what they think a MOOC is. Today it was about a LOOC. Yes that is right, instead of a Massive Open Online Course it is a Little Open Online Course. The University of Maine is experimenting with opening up some courses for free to between 2 and 7 students. These students will be treated as any other student in the class with the same expectations and opportunities to complete assignments and exams if they wish. However, they will not receive credit for their work. They can decide to become a paying student before the normal add/drop period ends. You can read the full story by Steve Kolowich at Inside Higher Ed.
This is an open course? The course is open for a select few sure, but beyond those 2- 7 students, this is a closed course (on Blackboard) that some people are given user names and passwords for and able to take for free. So this is a free course for a select few, but not really open.Take a look. http://www.umpi.edu/academic-resources/umpi-openu/how-it-works
So it is not really open and it certainly is not anything closely related to what a MOOC really is. It is closer to the idea of auditing a course. Are these courses using the idea of knowledge being shared? Is it distributed, networked, social, participatory? No, it seems that the focus of what a MOOC is has been on their size and not the change in how people learn. That to me is the most troublesome. So the question I am left with is what impact, if any, do MOOC's really have on higher education and adult learning? Are we learning anything about how people learn from them or simply twisting them and turning them into things like a "LOOC"?
