Focus - MOOC (part 1)

As underlined in the video you just watched, in terms of content that can be integrated in the teaching and learning experience, the outside world offers countless possibilities both through digital and physical channels. Specifically, in terms of the latter, we know that Massive Open Online Courses offer various digital contents. Let’s try to understand what we’re talking about when we refer to MOOC, with a focus provided in this page and the following.

The word MOOC refers to the new world of online educational courses at a university level potentially open to anyone, for free or at a low cost, thanks to the effort by some of the most prestigious American universities (to name just a few, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford).

To guide ourselves in distinguishing the MOOC from other online educational offers we can remember that, when we talk about MOOC, the various components of the acronym (Massive Open Online Courses) refer to an initiative that is first of all a course, so not a simply a collection of open resources, and therefore includes explicit educational objectives and relative syllabus, materials and activities that support learning, a system of assessment that can be based on quizzes, exercises or projects and a process of certification.
MOOC are also open in the meaning of accessible to all. So there are no constraining prerequisites to participation nor the need to belong to a particular institution and should not foresee costs for simple participation.
MOOCs are also useable through an online platform, generally taking particular care in mobile use, and are potentially massive, in the sense that they are planned and managed to guarantee a scale that can allow a potentially enormous number of people (some MOOCs count tens of thousand people enrolled). Beyond the defining features, when we talk about MOOC we refer to a particular format of digital learning that generally provides the participants in the course:

• a limited length (usually no longer than three months);
• a time frame of content and activities base on “weeks” (modules that refer to a technical use period of one week that require from 2 to 6-8 hours of work);
• content strongly focused on short videos that are very well curated (that can be seen on phones, too), but often integrated with readings, slides, infographics;
• tests and autocorrecting quizzes, but with a growing contribution due to collaborative activities, from discussions about specific topics and especially structured peer learning processes and peer evaluation that give value to the possibility of social interactions provided by the Network.