2011: the year of the MOOC

With 2011 almost gone, I thought I would write a bit about the major educational venture of 2011 (at least for me), the Massive Online Open Course (or MOOC).  Last year, at this time of year, if you told me that I would be spending a lot of time in MOOCs I would call you crazy.  While I had heard of MOOCs in 2009 and 2010, I was too busy with a capstone project (for my Instructional Design degree) and my comprehensive exams (for Applied Linguistics) to pay too much attention to PLENK and CCK09.

With formal schooling done (at least for now) and with no courses to take at the university I decided to experiment with MOOCs.   In January a friend and colleague, @cdetorres, recommended LAK11 - Learning Analytics. This was to be my first MOOC. It was quite interesting, I did learn quite a lot, and it just highlighted that I was interested in a topic, learning analytics, that I hadn't spent a lot of time pondering. The course was quite fast paced; a lot of things to do, in what seemed like a little time.

Then came CCK11 (connectivism and connected knowledge). I came into CCK not so much convinced of the first "C", connectivism, but I was all for "CK."  CCK11 felt more like a traditional course in that it was 13 weeks long (like a regular semester), and it contained mostly topics that I didn't know much about. It was also a natural extension of my psycholinguistics course that I had taken the previous semester. I am still not convinced of connectivism as a learning theory by itself, but  in conjunction with other things (like social constructionism) I think it works.

Then came MobiMOOC. MobiMOOC was a six week spring course. It was a great course, lead by experts in the field of mobile learning. This MOOC was not only informational but also introduced me to a lot of interesting people, some of them in the MobiMOOC Research Team with which I've worked on a couple of papers.  I think out of all the MOOCs this one was "just about right" both in terms of duration and in terms of content.  CCK was great but near the end I felt a bit of "senioritis" setting in and I didn't feel like going along with the course as much as I did in the beginning.

In the summer we had EduMOOC.  This one had the greatest promise but it ended up being a disappointment.  I had heard a lot of positive things about Ray Schroeder, the topic was interesting (education today and tomorrow) and I had three positive experiences in MOOCs coming into it...but this particular MOOC was all over the place, it lacked focus, and it just seemed like it wasn't designed (at all).  Oh well. Perhaps EduMOOC12 will be better :-)

Finally, there is Change MOOC (dubbed the mother of all MOOCs), which is still going on. I think that Change is what EduMOOC tried to be (at least from the eduMOOC descriptions available).  Change isn't bad, but it also isn't that well designed it seems.  Change seems more like a conference, and less like a "course", something that a number of bloggers have written about in the past four months. In the initial weeks there seemed to be a lot of "new" topics, but as time has gone on, it seems like things are being repeated.  The dip-in, jump-out also isn't helping since I see topics from the 3rd week of the MOOC come up again as new people join.  It's great, but for those that are keeping up it feels a but like clutter in the daily mail.  Oh well :-)  Something to be worked out in the form-factor of the MOOC, it's still young!

This year has been full of educational experiences, many new and interesting people on the internet (including but not limited to: Inge, Rebecca, Osvaldo, Sean, Michael, Nilgun, Serena, Jaap, John, Rita and brainysmurf) and a renewed potential for future open educational experiences.  Looking forward to 2012!

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