Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Gráinne Conole, University of Leicester DL Forum 26 th March 2013 National Teaching Fellow 2012 ASCILITE Fellow 2012

Outline What are they? Evolving MOOC landscape Design principles Pros and Cons The OLDS MOOC Disaggregation of Education

Image by James CridlandJames Cridland 100 million adults can’t afford university (UNESCO)

What are they?

Evolving MOOC landscape Online course with large-scale participation adopting open practices 2008 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge cMOOCs and xMOOCs Key players: Coursera, edX, Udacity Now: FutureLearn and a new Oz platform

Design principles Aggregation Remixing Re-purposing Feeding forward Personalised Multiple channels No ‘right’ pathway

Free Distributed global community Social inclusion High dropout rates Learning income not learning outcome Marketing exercise Pros and cons

ResourcesLearning pathways SupportAccreditation Disaggregation of education

The OER movement Over ten years of the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement Hundreds of OER repositories worldwide Presence on iTunesU Podcasts - iTunes U

The OPAL metromap Evaluation shows lack of uptake by teachers and learners Shift from development to community building and articulation of OER practice

POERUP outputs An inventory of more than 300 OER initiatives country reports and 13 mini-reports Comparative analysis of transversal OER initiatives 7 in-depth case studies 3 EU-wide policy papers

State of the art in OER Builds on a UNESCO conference on HE (09) Discourse on policy and practice How do institutions reposition themselves in an information rich world where tools and resources are freely available?

Combating social exclusion Completely open Free Education for all Easy to access and use Crosses boundaries Access to new knowledge and expertise Aggregation of resources Sharing ideas and practice Facilitates the development of networks

Learning pathways Guided pathways through materials Can promote different pedagogical approaches – Didactic – Constructivist – Situative – Connectivist Collaborative Pedagogical Patterns

Support Computer assisted Peer support Tutor support Community support Mentoring

Accreditation Peer to Peer University wikieducator.org/OER_university/ OER University Mozilla badges

Changing practices Nature of learning, teaching and research is changing It’s about – Harnessing new media – Adopting open practices New business models are emerging