The Original MOOCs

In 2008, the open teaching we were doing got a new name: Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. According to Wikipedia:

The term MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier, Manager of Web Communication and Innovations at the University of Prince Edward Island, and Senior Research Fellow Bryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education in response to an open online course designed and led by George Siemens, associate director, Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University and Stephen Downes, Senior Researcher at The National Research Council (Canada). The course was called "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge" and was presented to 25 tuition fee-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba in addition to 2,300 other students from the general public who took the online class free of charge. All course content was available through RSS feeds, and learners could participate with their choice of tools: threaded discussions in Moodle, blog posts, Second Life, and synchronous online meetings.

Since then many other MOOCs have emerged, including later editions of Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, as well as Learning Analytics, Jim Groom's DS106, and our EdStartup 101.

Dave Cormier, principally responsible for the term MOOC, describes them as follows:

Dave Cormier describes MOOCs

The MOOC Guide chronicles many of the first early MOOCs and describes their pedagogical commitments to connectivism. Anderson recently provided a really excellent summary of the principles of connectivism:

Two of the defining characteristics of connectivism are that the learning occurs through construction, annotation and maintenance of learning artifacts. A key characteristic of these artifacts is they must be persistent and be open, such that they contribute to knowledge, beyond the temporal or geographical boundaries of the learning group or course. The second critical element is that students be given opportunity, incentive and support to form networks that may (or may not) persist beyond the course, or with others not in the courses. These two qualities, open artifact persistence and networking opportunity, are for me the primary affordances of connectivist pedagogy.

The original MOOCs were highly social and included a huge amount of flexibility for learners. Because of their pedagogical commitment to connectivism the original MOOCs are now sometimes called "cMOOCs" to distinguish them from the Johnny-Come-Latelys we will discuss later.