MOOCs

What's a MOOC? "Massive open online course"; a course offered online that anybody can take, and delivered in a way that should make it possible for people to sign up in huge numbers at a time, even 10s of 1000s. Without having studied any of the detailed literature on MOOCs, I don't believe they involve any radical new development in online pedagogy, just a sort of package that aims to use some of the existing methodology in a way that people can take advantage of, townloads at a time. I think the biggest development is in the thinking of administrators: the idea that traditional universities might find it useful to make these things available, completely free and accessible to anybody with a computer and internet access.

We had a bit of a conversation today about MOOCs. It made me talk to one or two other people. I learned some things:

• some big universities have already got together to form MOOC delivery consortia: Coursera, edX, Udacity
• Edinburgh was the first university in the UK to become seriously involved in MOOC delivery, but with results that should be classed as "mixed", and a range of student experiences
• one key, maybe the most important, to making these "massive" is that they're free. This also means it's easy to drop out again, no matter how good your intentions, if the rest of your life gets in the way. If completion rates reach 50% my feeling is they're doing really well
• mixed experiences continue, I think maybe mixed both in the experience the institutions provide and the expectations students bring
• we're absolutely on trend, man (well, late getting there): there is a MOOC hashtag in Twitter

You can see the appeal to us in what-used-to-be-DACE: the walls of the academy not just surmounted, but dissolved. There are so many reasons this won't happen, some obvious, others needing more digging out. But lots of them are there. Millions of comments will, I know, appear immediately below. For now let me conclude by noting my inordinate pride in the neologism, "townloads".