MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC

By Donald Clark. What are MOOCs?
“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed” said William Gibson, that is certainly true of MOOCs. We have MOOC mania but ‘all MOOCs are not created equal’ and there’s lots of species of MOOC. This is good and we must learn from these experiments to move forward and not get bogged down in old traditionalist v modernist arguments. MOOCs will inform and shape what we do within and without institutions. What is important is to focus on the real needs of real learners.

Taxonomy based on pedagogy

To this end, it is important to define a taxonomy of MOOCs not from the institutional but the pedagogic perspective, by their learning functionality, not by their origins. So here's a starting list of eight:

transferMOOCs

madeMOOCs

synchMOOCs

asynchMOOCs

adaptiveMOOCs

groupMOOCs

connectivistMOOCs

miniMOOCSs. Read more...