Thursday, September 6, 2012

A MOOC and LOOC?

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"?



7 comments:

  1. Hi!

    I like the idea of LOOCs. I completed David Wiley's #ioe12 and it felt like I could have gotten a little more out of it if I had a little more support from the instructor, or if efforts were made to mix the different audiences a little bit more (F2F and MOOCkies).

    That's the approach I take for my new class on social networking for educators. It's not a MOOC, but if people are interested in tagging along and providing an outsider view, I'll give them my attention.

    http://openteaching.ud-css.net/

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  2. Hi Mathieu,

    I agree that #ioe12 would have been much more beneficial if there was an instructor presence. I will look at your course more closely, but at quick glance it seems very interesting and really better than the LOOC idea. Yours is more open and harnessing social networking (which makes sense with the topic!) in ways closer to that of a MOOC would. I love your statement about canvas discussions in your syllabus. Very nice!

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  3. Thanks, if you want to interact with the students, you're more than welcome to do so. You can request access to any of the social media channels we're using (Pinterest, G+, Diigo, Google groups, Hangouts during live events, etc.).

    I will come up with a badge process this weekend too.

    Mathieu

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    1. Thanks! I wish I had the time to fully participate. I am taking a 6 credit doctorate course on top of having a very busy work schedule so timing is probably not the best for me right now. Badges would be great. One thing that frustrated me about #ioe12 was that I never got my badge. Had a nice email conversation with David, but he never followed through with doing what he had to do.

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    2. All good. Totally understandable.

      David never actually awarded my badge, but I have the evidence that I earned it, so I'm not offended.

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    3. Great point! I think there are several of us in that same spot. At Empire several of us took it using a study group approach. I am working on my Sloan-C presentation about it. It was nice having the face-to-face group to discuss the topics with.

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  4. Hi,

    I think the MOOC 'phenomenon' has had such a big splash because it fills a yearning need with just the right combination of attributes (open availability, partially asynchronous, institutional prestige). I think when people talk about MOOCs often they don't just think about MOOCs as they are, but also as a billowing cloud of related possibilities that it represents...some of which are not massive, not very open, not completely online, nor necessarily even courses!

    Clearly, MOOCs are just one implementation of a solution to some of the needs out there, and surely a diverse range of offerings will be developed in the future that fit different purposes, from students to interest groups to retirees, from informal peer-based discovery, to one-way lectures, to open debate & advocacy. I myself am thrilled at the possibilities and don't take the MOOC moniker, nor their current substantiation, too literally...

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