By Alastair Creelman. The discussion forum is a central feature of all learning management systems and the focus for most online courses. Often it's the only interactive feature in the course but it's notoriously difficult to generate real discussion there. Too few participants and it will probably never take off. Too many and it becomes chaotic. In many cases students only post in the forum because there are credits at stake and very often the real discussion takes place elsewhere; on Facebook or Google Hangouts for example.
So if the forums of regular online courses are difficult to run effectively they will prove almost impossible in a MOOC with potentially tens of thousands of participants. Nonetheless most MOOCs persist with them as a token attempt at interaction or because the forum is somehow a default setting in online learning. Generally MOOC forums become overwhelming and chaotic with hundreds of unrelated threads and the vast majority of participants take one look and never return. An article in Campus Technology, Building a Sense of Community in MOOCs, reinforces this impression that forums are actually counter-productive. More...

By Tamara Chuang. Shopping for No. 2 pencils, packing little lunch boxes and sending children back to class may have some grownups nostalgic to return to school themselves. Education, of course, never ends and today there are massive new options, which barely existed five years ago.
Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, open up college classes to anyone in the world with Internet access. Typically, it's free. While online courses have been around for years, they were relegated to video-based lessons, online quizzes and tuition-payers.
Today, an estimated 100 universities nationwide offer a MOOC, plus countless others around the globe. Classes can attract thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of students. More...

Les zombies sont partout : après des cours pour résister à leurs attaques, ils s'invitent désormais dans un MOOC (cours en ligne ouvert massivement) que proposera l'université d'Irvine, aux Etats-Unis. Une manière d'aborder des thèmes plus sérieux…
Voici un cours en ligne ouvert massivement (CLOM en France, ou MOOC en anglais) qui devrait tenter un certain nombre d'étudiants. Un MOOC sera en effet proposé, dès cette rentrée, par l'université californienne d'Irvine, au Etats-Unis. Particularité : il portera sur les zombies de "The Walking Dead", une série qui cartonne des deux côtés de l'Atlantique depuis quelques années désormais. Un cours rendu possible grâce au concours d'AMC, la chaine qui diffuse la série, et qui a conclu un partenariat amiable avec la faculté. Suite...

This is a question that I tackle in my Udemy course The Wide World of MOOCs. Almost immediately after I uploaded this preview to YouTube, someone on Twitter politely challenged me.
She took umbrage to my assertion that MOOCs are pedagogically richer than “regular” online courses.
Her counter argument was that the pedagogical devices that I cited – readings, online discussion forums, social media groups and local meetups – are the same learning and teaching functionalities available in any LMS. Read more...

By Peter Scott. Massive open online courses, or Moocs, will probably turn out to be little more than an edu-tainment 'bubble', says Peter Scott. I have tried, really hard, not to write about Moocs. But I can't keep it up forever, and what better time than the silly season to write about this phenomenon, which may transform higher education, or just turn out to be another damp squib.
Moocs, for anyone who has switched off from the chattering of the policy/management class, are massive open online courses. The idea is that courses are uploaded to the "cloud" where they are available to everyone. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is credited with being first, and now some big global media companies have piled in. The catch, of course, is that credentials – which is higher education's core business – will remain as tightly rationed as ever. More...

By Dennis Hayes. Massive open online courses, like too many modern universities, can only offer qualifications, not education. MOOCs, or massive open online courses, are part of an ‘avalanche’ that is coming for higher education, according to a report earlier this year by Sir Michael Barber. The former policy wonk, now employed as the chief education adviser at publishers Pearson, claimed that online courses will challenge the traditional university, in its physical campus form at least.
There is a lot of excitement about the number of students enrolled on MOOCs since the big three US providers launched in 2012 – the ‘year of the MOOC’. The biggest provider, Coursera, now claims over 4.5million ‘Courserians’; edX has one million students, while for-profit Udacity has more than 750,000 students. Futurelearn, the UK’s first MOOC provider, was launched in December 2012 and is about to open its portfolio of courses. Futurelearn is led by the Open University, which has over 240,000 students of its own and an historical status as an innovative distance-learning institution. Read more...