A white paper on MOOC

Nice paper on MOOC:

As the text is copyrighted,  I would refer part of it here:

1. What new pedagogies and organisational mechanisms might be required if MOOC are to deliver a high quality learning experience?

xMOOCs have been criticised for adopting a knowledge transmission model; in essence, they are considered to be technology-enriched traditional teacher-centred instruction (Larry, 2012).

By contrast, cMOOCs provide great opportunities for non-traditional forms of teaching approaches and learner-centred pedagogy where students learn from one another.  Online communities ‘crowd-source’ answers to problems, creating networks that distribute learning in ways that seldom occur in traditional classrooms in universities.

Here I have elaborated on cMOOCs:

The c MOOCs

The second type of MOOC are those which focus principally on the learners’ preferences and thus be based on learner-centred model of teaching and learning.  Here the professors would negotiate the teaching with learners with networked based learning.  The focus would likely be on the education and learning process, with distributed learning and technology as an enabler, with a connectivist approach towards learning and crowd sourcing as a means to aggregate the distributed learning.  This could be the current model of c MOOC, based on emergent learning.

The new pedagogies and organisational mechanisms that might be required include a hybrid model of MOOCs where content and process are mixed and matched to suit different cohorts of educators, professors and learners.

My observation and comments about the paper:

1. It is great to have a summary on MOOCs, providing an overall view about the current trend of MOOCs and their implications on Higher Education.  This is surely welcomed by many MOOC providers, Higher Education Institutions and their decision makers and administrators.

2. The paper used a number of sources as references, including wikipedia, blog posts and media posts, rather than the formal peer-reviewed papers.  This seems a radical approach towards referencing, in white paper.  What criteria should be used in the selection of such sources as references in white and research papers?  It could be interesting to learn from the authors how decisions are made on this matter.

3. This paper is unique in that most of the findings are drawn from blog posts and discussion papers, which is pretty useful.  I think more research findings with empirical data (big data and learning analytics) would help in revealing the SWOTS of MOOCs.

The paper is a must read for any policy makers, administrators, professors and educators who are interested in the design and development of online/distance education and MOOCs.