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What is MOOC?
What is MOOC?
are digital learning platforms that provide free or affordable access to a wide range of educational content. Developed by universities, institutions, and industry experts, MOOCs offer flexible, self-paced learning in various subjects, including business, technology, science, and the arts. Platforms like Coursera, edX, Udemy, and FutureLearn host these courses, often featuring video lectures, quizzes, interactive discussions, and certification options. MOOCs enable learners worldwide to develop new skills, advance their careers, or explore personal interests without the constraints of traditional education. Their accessibility and affordability make them a valuable tool for lifelong learning.
Women and men of all ages need new types of media and information literacy competencies in today’s digital world. This is urgent as people face choices between privacy and safety on the Internet and between freely expressing themselves and the ethical use of information, digital technologies, and media. Education for all must therefore include Media and Information Literacy (MIL) for all.
The push to achieve media and information literate societies recognizes that MIL in formal education is a necessity but not a final stop. Attaining MIL in formal education has been a long and slow process. However, the momentum must be kept up. MIL must also go beyond the classroom.
To increase access to MIL training, we have supported the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on MIL in multiple languages, in cooperation with different partners. MOOCs are asynchronous web-based courses geared towards enabling several hundreds of students all over the world to enroll and learn from top world-renowned academic institutions at the same time. MOOCs deliver content via recorded video lectures, online readings, and online assessments, with various degrees of student-student and student-instructor interactions. Many MOOC-providers offer free courses, which entice more people to enroll. There are MOOCs that provide certificates of completion to the students; however, most of them do not count for college credit.
The learning material or video content used in an MOOC is created by an educational institution, usually a university or a college that offers such programs. The organization and administration operation of an MOOC are coordinated by active MOOC platforms (e.g., Coursera and edX). MOOCs were created from the idea of covering an entire university course online and thereby making it accessible to everyone in the world. The intent was to "democratize" educational content from elite universities.
HISTORY OF MOOCS
HISTORY OF MOOCS
The first MOOCs emerged from the open educational resources (OER) movement, which was sparked by MIT OpenCourseWare project. The OER movement was motivated by work by researchers who pointed out that class size and learning outcomes had no established connection. Within the OER movement, the Wikiversity was founded in 2006, and the first open course on the platform was organized in 2007. The term MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island in response to a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (also known as CCK08). CCK08, which was led by George Siemens of Athabasca University and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council, consisted of 25 tuition-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba, as well as over 2200 online students from the general public who paid nothing.
Other cMOOCs were then developed; for example, Jim Groom from The University of Mary Washington and Michael Branson Smith of York College, City University of New York, hosted MOOCs through several universities, starting with 2011's 'Digital Storytelling' (DS106) MOOC. MOOCs from private, non-profit institutions emphasized prominent faculty members and expanded existing distance learning offerings (e.g., podcasts) into free and open online courses.
Alongside the development of these open courses, other e-learning platforms emerged, such as Khan Academy, Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU), Udemy, and Alison, which are viewed as similar to MOOCs and work outside the university system or emphasize individual, self-paced lessons.
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