The Pedagogy of MOOCs

By Paul Stacey. There is a great deal of energy, enthusiasm, and change happening in today’s education sector. Existing and new education providers are leveraging the Internet, ICT infrastructure, digital content, open licensing, social networking, and interaction to create new forms of education. Open Educational Resources (OER) (including open textbooks), Open Access, and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have all gained traction as significant drivers of education innovation.
MOOCs in particular are stimulating widespread discussion around the potential to reach and serve hundreds of thousands of learners who would otherwise not have access to education. Like all of you I’ve been tracking MOOC’s with great interest. While MOOC’s have attracted huge attention, and hype, for supporting massive enrollments and for being free its the pedagogical aspects of MOOC’s that interest me the most.
The challenge is this – How can you effectively teach thousands of students simultaneously? I’m fascinated by the contrast between post-secondary faculty and K-12 teacher contract agreements that limit class size and the current emergent MOOC aim of having as many enrollments as possible. What a dichotomy. MOOC’s have done a great job at creating courses open to massive enrollments from anywhere around the world. But how well are MOOC’s doing at actually successfully teaching those students? Based on MOOCs equally massive dropout rates having teaching and learning success on a massive scale will require pedagogical innovation. It’s this innovation, more than massive enrollments or free that I think make MOOC’s important. Let me explain.
MOOC’s originated in Canada and I’ve been fortunate to have followed and experienced the early pioneering work of people like Stephen Downes, Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, and George Siemens. In 2007 there was Social Media & Open Education, in 2008 & 2009 Connectivism, in 2010 Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge, in 2011 Learning and Knowledge Analytics which we hosted in the BCcampus SCoPE online community. For a more complete listing see Stephen Downes Partial History of MOOC’s. Read more...