When is a MOOC Not a MOOC?

Stanford AI

In the fall of 2011, two Stanford professors announced that they would teach their artificial intelligence course in the open. George Siemens pondered the Stanford course and wondered aloud:

The dynamics of an open course are very different from what I imagine Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are used to in their courses at Stanford. In a MOOC, you are not the sole provider of knowledge nor the determiner of space. Transparency is vital in order to develop trust. Why is trust important in an open course? Well, an open course starts as a shell with the instructor providing links, articles, and activities. From there, learners take course content and massage it, enhance it, extend it, clarify it, question it, and improve it. Passionate learners – the ones to take the time to improve a course – need a level of trust and transparency between course organizers. In an open course, the educator isn’t the one showering participants with gifts of knowledge. The process of learning is iterative and the relationship is mutually beneficial. Participants do the course organizers as much of a favour in joining as the course organizers do in opening the course.

But rather than follow the highly social and flexible model of the original MOOCs, the AI course was designed as a single path through videos and computer-graded exercises. In other words, the course was a mass produced, fully automated experience that required no social interaction. Pedagogically, the course resembled the first online courses offered in the mid 1990s.

In an additional divergence from the original MOOCs, the course materials for the Stanford AI course were fully copyrighted and not openly licensed: "All content or other material available on the Class Sites or through the Online Course, including but not limited to code, images, text, layouts, arrangements, displays, illustrations, documents, audio and video clips, HTML, and files (collectively, the "Content"), are the property of KnowLabs and/or its affiliates or licensors and are protected by copyright, patent and/or other proprietary intellectual property rights under United States and foreign law."

The course was not particularly pedagogically innovative and the course contents were fully copyrighted. But anyone could enroll in the course for free, and the course had the cachet of the Stanford name brand. When you add "Stanford" + free enrollment + a sexy topic like artificial intelligence, you get over 225,000 students signing up. Consequently, the Stanford AI course was the first course truly worthy of the term "massive."

Peter Norvig discusses the Stanford AI course. This video is licensed CC BY-NC-NC by TED.

Inexplicably, perhaps because the course really was massive, the press applied the term "MOOC" to the Stanford AI course. This despite the fact that the Stanford course design was the antithesis of everything the original MOOCs represented. To distinguish the original connectivist MOOCs from the "new" MOOCs, the designations cMOOC and xMOOC are sometimes used.

The success of the Stanford AI course (i.e., success at attracting a massive number of learners - not necessarily in effectively facilitating learning) captured the imagination of the press. Suddenly they couldn't get of what they now called MOOCs. (Audrey Watters, perhaps the only ed tech journalist who actually "gets it," demonstrated the obsession by compiling a sample of the 2012 press coverage: "MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs MOOCs ad infinitum.")

The New Space Race

With the press came the entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The Stanford AI course has launched a new space race, with each new competitor making larger claims about the number of students it will serve than the previous one and bringing in more investment dollars than the previous one.

Sebastian Thrun quit Stanford and founded Udacity, a company that develops free-to-enroll courses using designs similar to the Stanford AI model. As of late 2012 Udacity offers 19 courses has raised over $15 million in venture capital. Thrun has said he hopes to teach 500,000 students (Wikipedia).

Coursera is another for-profit educational technology company founded by computer science professors from Stanford - Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller. Coursera partners with various universities and makes some of their courses available in a free-to-enroll online format. As of late 2012, Coursera has almost 2 million students (1,900,000+) and $16 million in venture capital (Wikipedia).

EdX began as a non-profit cooperation between MIT and Harvard. Each institution invested $30 million dollars in the effort ($60 million total). A critical distinction between EdX and the two for-profit companies mentioned above is that EdX does use an open license for its courses. Since its founding, EdX has expanded to include UC Berkeley, the University of Texas System, Wellesley, and Georgetown. As of late 2012, EdX offers 15 courses and wants to reach 1,000,000,000 (one billion) students.

EdX overview. This video is (c) EdXOnline and is not covered by the course's CC BY license.

Extramural MOOCs

Apart from the organizations affiliated with formal educational institutions, several other organizations are offering independent, free-to-enroll courses. A prime example is Code Academy. Code Academy offers several computer programming courses with in-browser, automatically graded programming exercises. Code School works on a similar model, though only some of its courses are free-to-enroll. Both sites eschew an open license.