Whatever happened to the MOOC?

It has been just over a year since I last wrote about the Massive Open Online Courses on Wonkhe, and since then we have climbed onto our Hype Cycle, crested the Peak of Expectation, and are currently speeding towards the Trough of Disillusionment.
For the uninitiated a MOOC can refer to

    (a) A (generally) free-to-take online course building on the “artificial intelligence” open online course experiments by Sebastian Thrun at Stanford in 2011, and typified by Udacity, Coursera and FutureLearn.
    (b) A free-to-take, (mostly) openly licensed online course building on the “Connectivism” ideas pioneered in 2008 by George Siemens, Dave Cormier, Rita Kop and Stephen Downes, and typified by a range of smaller courses based around learning networks.
    (c) Other examples of open class and online delivery, usually influenced by connectivist ideas if not explicitly so. Examples include Phonar, H817open and ds106.
    (d) “Something something INTERNETS something something LEARNING something FREE”. Typified by articles in Forbes, Fast Company and the New York Times written by people who claim to be journalists but haven’t done any research.

Rather than address an imagined “MOOC movement” as a whole, it makes more sense to look at each tendency in isolation, and with a greater emphasis on where the money and hype is. There is some overlap, but also a great deal of disdain/suspicion.
Type (a) MOOCs (sometimes known as xMOOCs, the “x” standing for “cool letter at the front”) are the ones that have been burning through all that venture capital money, and their thinking has turned towards more sustainable business models. See more...