The State of MOOCs: An EdTech Researcher Retrospective

By Justin Reich. MIT's Media Lab is holding a course this fall called Media Lab X: A Design Course for New Learning Platforms, devoted to tackling design problems in online learning, from MOOCs to Skillsharing and beyond. They asked me to speak last week, so I gave a short talk, which basically was stringing together ideas from several posts I've written here. It seemed like a good moment to offer an EdTech Researcher retrospective on MOOCs.
First, be sure you understand what connectivism is and the history of the development of MOOCs from 2008. The history and present of so called cMOOCs sheds light on some of the limitations of the much more well known xMOOCs published by Udacity, Coursera, edX and so forth. From EdTech Researcher, start with On our cMOOC inspired site for the Future of Learning Institute, but then be sure to read this recent piece from Times Higher Education about the history of MOOCs. More...