A massive open online course (MOOC) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs). MOOCs are a recent development in distance education.
The first MOOCs emerged from the open educational resources (OER) movement. The term MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island and Senior Research Fellow Bryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education in response to a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge.
MOOCs differ from other free online courses in a number of ways.
1. A MOOC offers opportunities to interact, either with tutor-like software or with other students.
2. A MOOC unfolds in real time like a real class.
3. Some MOOCs also provide certificates of completion if you do the homework and exams.
Silicon Valley rivals Udacity & Coursera are shaping up to be the Hertz & Avis of MOOC-dom, although it's still an open query which will be number. Coursera is way ahead in the number of courses planned or in progress, & this week it announced that 12 more universities were joining its lineup, to make a total of 16 schools represented. Its over 100 courses include humanities & social science along with math, engineering & science.
| edX | Coursera | UDACITY |
| Certification | Certification | Certification |
| Secure assessments | Employers paying to recruit talented students | |
| Employee recruitment | Students résumés and job match services | |
| Applicant screening | Sponsored high-tech skills courses | |
| Human tutoring or assignment marking | ||
| Enterprises pay to run their own training courses | ||
| Sponsorships | ||
| Tuition fees |
No comments:
Post a Comment