Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ MOOC, COOC, SPOC: What’s the Difference?

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Short little article explaining the terms; good as an introduction. The attribution to Professor Armando Fox for coining the term SPOC can also be found in the Wikipedia article on the topic and the source is this University Business article in July, 2013. Fox presents the term in From MOOCs to SPOCs, published in December, 2013. But this may just be EdX president Anant Agarwal  getting ahead of the publication date to give Fox (and hence EdX) credit (there's also a New York Times article April 29 giving Agarwal himself credit for the term, and a Fast Company article in February, 2013, doing the same, and an unattributed EdX newsletter article from March 18 in which the term is used.). The Financial Times credits it to NovoEd, from early 2013, though the article referenced never uses the term SPOC. So, yes, the term most likely comes from EdX, maybe from Fox, but more likely from one of the unnamed developers on the Studio team ('Studio' is the EdX application used to create courses). (p.s. I spent a couple of hours digging for this post, and I would like to say that Google is terribly unreliable regarding the date of articles (eg. it reads 2-12-2016 as February, 2012)).

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