Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Página 11

Defining a MOOC has become problematic in the strictest sense as after all, what is
‘massive’? It has been defined as:
“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.
Features associated with early MOOCs, such as open licensing of content,
open structure and learning goals, and connectivism may not be present in
all MOOC projects, in particular with the 'openness' of many MOOCs being
called into question raising issues around the 'reuse' and 'remixing' of
resources" (Wikipedia, 2013).
MOOCs have developed into two distinct forms, known as cMOOCs and xMOOCs
(Daniel, 2012). The original MOOCs were free forming, constructivist, connectivist
courses, run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. Their first MOOC (a term
coined by their colleague, Dave Cormier) was “Connectivism and Connective
Knowledge” at Athabasca University, Canada, in 2008. It was originally designed
for 25 on campus, paying students and they decided to open it up to anyone who
would like to participate, attracting 2,300 students from around the world (Yuan and
Powell, 2013). The MOOC was successful but did not attract mainstream media
interest in the way that the xMOOCs have. This unfamiliar and decentralized model
was not attractive to mainstream educators. The xMOOCs key feature is the use of
a platform, similar to a Learning Management System (LMS) used in many
Universities. These MOOCs are built on a Behaviourist model of education, similar
to the lecture format used across the world and because of that familiarity, coupled
with the ‘high quality’ institutions, this has been the model that has been adopted by
most of the MOOC subscribers. This has led to claims of production line education,
rather than being high quality, it has been argued that it is devaluing education
though the McDonaldisation of Education (Lane & Kinser, 2012). It is likely that as
MOOCs evolve, the extremes will become diluted and a new model of online
learning through massive scale interactions will develop.

2.2 MOOCS AS DISRUPTORS
The MOOC phenomenon has been described in the media as a disruption, a
Tsunami (Brooks, 2012). Offering the ‘content’ for free is challenging the traditional
fee-paying university student model. This could be classed as a disruption to the

MSc Digital Education

University of Edinburgh, 2014

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