Mooc creators criticise courses’ lack of creativity

By Chris Parr. Original vision lost in scramble for profit and repackaging of old ideas, say pair.
When The New York Times declared 2012 the “Year of the Mooc”, you would have been forgiven for thinking that the term – which stands for “massive open online course” – had been coined some time that year. Not so. “Mooc” was first used five years ago in Canada by a group of academics who can claim to be the true originators of what has become the academic buzzword du jour: a type of online learning that, although not without its critics, has taken the global academy by storm.
It was Stephen Downes, senior research officer at Canada’s National Research Council, and George Siemens, then working at the University of Manitoba and now a professor in the School of Computing and Information Systems at Athabasca University, who created the online course Connectivism and Connective Knowledge in 2008: it is widely regarded as the first true Mooc. More...