Multilitteratus Incognitus

Note: An MS Word or PDF version of this can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/205134044 Introduction It’s been a few years of extreme sentiments around MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). 2012 was proclaimed the year of the MOOC (Pappano, 2012). 2013 was the year that MOOC criticism was the new trendy or “in” thing (Rees, 2013). Perhaps in 2014 we’ll move away from such dichotomies and evaluate what’s working in MOOCs, what’s not; and what we can import into traditional online learning.    A while back I read a post on WCET about redirecting the conversation about MOOCs. One line that really caught my eye, and that has really struck me up to now, was “let’s Learn from MOOCs and recapture the microphone” (Cillay, 2013).   Now, MOOCs are still in an experimental mode, and we will be in this mode for quite some time in my estimation. After all, classes need to run, so that we can collect data, analyze it, come up with hypotheses and test them. Then rinse and repe...

Back at the end of 2011 I started collecting research on MOOCs, pieces from Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle, "news items" from other popular media outlets (like wired.com and forbes) as well as blog posts from certain notable people who commented a lot on the subject of MOOCs.  The idea was to spend a year (2011 to end of 2012) and see not only what the research says, but also what the sentiment is around this phenomenon.  After all neither online education, not open education were particularly new, so it would be interesting to see what was going on.  I didn't really do much in 2012, and I continued collecting materials in 2013 with the intent to work on the project in 2013, but life intervened. Another thing that made me not keen on continuing this project was that I also saw a lot of negativity in 2013 around MOOCs; as some people dubbed it it was the year of Anti-MOOC, but I also saw  a lot of uninformed opinions about MOOCs in some really prominent place...