What Was the First MOOC?

By Cathy Davidson. Did you know that the first MOOC-like massive, open, online course was offered by HASTAC in 2006-2007? Of course, many insist that it was Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig who developed the first MOOC in 2011 when they taught their artificial intelligence course at Stanford that drew 160,000 online registrants. Others go back to 2008 when Stephen Downes and George Siemens mounted  an online course partly to prove that you could do connectivist open learning via a digital platform. As a recent article in Slate  notes,  connectivist learning theory "draws  from neuroscience and computer networking" and "postulates that knowledge is distributed across human and nonhuman nodes in a network. Downes and Siemens argue that in the 21st century, education is the ability to navigate this network, link disparate fields, and contribute to the understanding of other people." More...