MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course, and if you search the web for how a MOOC should be designed and what can be considered a MOOC you get many different opinions and definitions. Apparently, it is easy to confuse and consider many forms of online teaching with the concept of MOOC (e..g, to sound cool or jump on the hype train), but according to some it boils down to one’s mindset towards education and how a course is planned and designed from scratch. The following is a definition of a MOOC that I came across during my research in the course, and I think is very interesting to share. It is from an article titled “Academic libraries in the age of MOOCs” by Kerry Wu [1]:
“A MOOC is not the online version of a face-to-face (F2F) class. It’s not a collection of “recorded classroom lectures” and lecture notes. It is a “born digital” class, even if it’s adapted from an existing F2F class. Video lectures are the core of MOOCs. MOOC providers leverage technologies to create a rich learning environment by incorporating at least one and often most of the following elements: professor speaking directly to the camera while accompanied by PowerPoint slides, notes, or animated illustrations on digital whiteboards; in-video quizzes; additional video clips that are not part of the professor talk; and video interviews of guest speakers”.
What this can mean for us in our journey towards online education is that simply transferring course materials to a digital format and offering them remotely does not mean that we are offering a MOOC. This is particularly important when we take into the scalability aspect of MOOCs. In dsigning MOOCs the right approach could be to plan them from the beginning and consider appropriate platforms and digital solutions to make the course scalable and attractive to a wide spectrum of students.
This was particularly observed during the recent COVID-19 pandemic where university teachers rushed to prepare an online version of their courses and faced many issues in this regard. One issue, for instance, was how to design course exams and what could be the right format and platform to perform examination of course students. Another important issue to take into account is that as a course scales up and is offered to a wider variety of students from different regions, having alternative technical solutions for delivery of course material and content can become more important. For instance, while assuming that YouTube can be a right platform for delivery of video content, it is important to also know that in some countries access to YouTube is limited. Also some ISPs may limit bandwidth usage for video steaming. All these factors can in the end determine the success or failure of a MOOC.
[1] Wu, K. (2013), “Academic libraries in the age of MOOCs”, Reference Services Review, Vol. 41 No. 3, pp. 576-587. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-03-2013-0015
