What’s the “problem†with MOOCs?
Doug Holton,
EdTechDev,
Jun 07, 2012
There's a lot to munch through in this post. Doug Holton begins by listing criticisms of some recent MOOCs and open online learning initiatives, such as Coursera, Khan Academy, and Curt Bonk's MOOC. He traces the problems in these courses to a lack of instructional design. "Teaching," he writes, "should be treated as a design science, more like engineering than just an art or craft that we all think we can intuitively do well." In response to MOOC "purists" who appeal to connection more than content he argues "Connecting" learners to one another or exposing them to content may often not be sufficient to magically cause learning to happen or to cause significant changes in beliefs and practice." In the same vein, "making content 'open' isn't sufficient to magically cause learning to happen," he argues. learning needs to be situated in practice, problems or authentic experience, he argues, proposing "MOOLEs (massive open online learning experience) instead of MOOCs." I have personally resisted 'designing' MOOCs because that returns us to a centrally-focused provider-defined model of learning, which (to me) is the opposite of what MOOCs are about.
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