The Rise of MOOCs

By Stephen Downes. Responses to interview questions posed by Kevin Charles Redmon, Independent Journalist and Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism.
1. Are MOOCs an idea that were floating around the halls of universities for some time now, or was the first one in 2008 really a watershed moment?
Many of the ideas that go into a MOOC were around before CCK08 but that course marks the first time the format came together. In particular, we would point to David Wiley's Introduction to Open Education course, which was offered as an open wiki (later called the Wiley Wiki - see https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/cck08---mooc-basics ) and Alec Couros's open course ECI831 - Social Media and Open Education (see https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/social-media-and-open-education ). These two courses were of course influenced by other work in the field - the concept of open education, in which Wiley was a pioneer, with a license preceeding the Creative Commons licenses, the open wiki, which of course was made famous by Wikipedia, and more. What makes the MOOC offered by George Siemens and myself different was that it was a distributed course. This is what enabled the 'massive' part of 'Massive Open Online Course'. Read more...