So what's a MOOC?
It's a new "in" thing in technology. It stands for Massive Online Open Course.
MOOCs have grown out of universities offering their courses on the web to anyone who wants
to work on the course, without the necessity of being registered with an
education institution, or getting credits for the course. MIT, Stanford and a number of universities
are making courses available on this open basis, with no limits to the number
of students who can take the course--as long as they accept that they won't be
getting course credits.
I have signed up for a four-week MOOC on virtual
school research, organized by Michael Barbour, an Assistant Professor at Wayne
State University in Michigan. He is the
academic who has probably done the most work on tracking developments in K-12
online learning in Canada. He has
produced an annual report on online education for iNACOL, the International
Association for K-12 Online Learning.
Information about iNACOL can be found at their web
site http://www.inacol.org/
Barbour's most recent report, "State of the
Nation: K-12 Online Learning in Canada," can be found at http://www.inacol.org/research/bookstore/detail.php?id=32
The MOOC has "assignments" and various "badges"
that you can earn, basically self-evaluation of work that you carry out. As an example, the assignment that goes with
the first entry in the MOOC is to post in your blog on one of these topics:
1. Select five K-12 online and/or
blended learning programs and describe them using one of more of the various
classifications and descriptors above.
OR
2. Make a case for one of the
current classification structures or propose a classification of your own that
includes aspects of more than one of the definitions/classifications projects
described above.
This MOOC is particularly relevant at this point to
some of my work as a member of the BC Teachers' Federation Research
Department. I am working on a project
with a group of BC Distributed Learning teachers, looking at many of the issues
that face our DL programs and the people who teach in them.
In the MOOC's introductory lecture (both video and
print elements), Barbour talks about the many different definitions that have
been used to describe virtual education, primarily focusing on the many
versions in the U.S. Some of the
diversity and confusion, Barbour reports, could be intentional:
"It should be noted that some scholars have
suggested that these ever expanding definitions and classifications of K-12
online learning have been done for political reasons to show higher than actual
growth within the field (in many instances by those who have made outrageous
predictions about the scope of K-12 online learning in the coming years)."
I'm not going to do either of the suggested blog
posts. Rather, I will write one that
describes as succinctly as possible the Distributed Learning structure in
British Columbia. I will post the writing that I do for the MOOC on the
edu-digicritic blog as the project goes on.
If you are interested in joining the MOOC, you can
find it at http://virtualschoolmooc.wikispaces.com/.
It is free and open.