Good examples of MOOCs in the world

"Massive Open Online Courses are particularly prevalent in the USA, as some of the preceding will have indicated. After the creation of the Open CourseWare Consortium the movement has grown at a tremendous rate. Repositories such as iTunesU also carry significant chucks of courses made freely available. They all serve admirably as promotion tools for their institutions. However, given 9 the discussions above, a significant question to ask is about their real place in the open education movement. There is no doubt that they are freely available, accessible and contain materials that are cleared for use in any educational or personal context; but to what extent are MOOCs in fact just larger-scale learning objects without the reuse and remix flexibility of OER? The point may well prove to be a significant one as MOOCs are beginning to dominate the arena of what is freely available. On the other hand they do represent alternative business models for HEIs seeking to reach much further than traditional teaching practices allow and usually have other pedagogic grounding (although often with a constructionist bent). In the UK significant investment has been made in MOOC development through the Future learn project, headed up by the Open University. It will be interesting to follow how this work develops over the next few years and the responses and discussion that continue around the pedagogy of OER as a consequence. Check out the following links for MOOCs and more:

Coursera – “Take the world’s best courses, online, for free.” Some Problems and Challenges

FutureLearn – The development in UK-based MOOCs (The Open University are involved in this)

MIT/edX – “The Future of Online Education”: the consortium website for courses from leading universities in the USA.

OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCWC) "

A MOOC is a Massive Open Online Course, and in general they have three principles:

    • They are free at the point of usage
    • You can work flexibly to complete your work
    • They have some of the best educators around the world


Taken from



there are some high profile MOOCS such as futurelearn but they often have a relatively hefty "upgrade" service as seen below


Taken from: https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/teaching-computing-stem

This is a common problem of Computer Science MOOCs - produced in the university I work...

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/outreach/cpd/computingteachers/

This was created in 2014, but is now defunct - despite the objective of a MOOC being self sufficient



https://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/users/sign_in Not OER but a middle ground (Think Nova)