IEEE Spectrum December, 2012 - 30

I'm in the Mood
for MOOCs
We started talking about what it meant to have lots and lots of people learning
together. Somewhere in there, I called them a massive open online course, for
which I have been often chastised. -Dave Cormier, education researcher

I

f you decided to learn
a piece of music, a piano
concerto, say, you'd likely
start by getting a copy of
the score to study. However,
what if you came away from
that study with only the
knowledge that the score
consisted of 1432 A notes,
1268 Es, 745 G-sharps, and
so on? Have you learned the
piece? No, of course not-
it's not the number of notes
that matters.
That's kind of the idea
behind a new theory of learning called connectivism.
30

To the connectivist, a
branch of knowledge isn't
a set of isolated facts to be
memorized. Instead, it's actually a large set-or really a
network-of connections, and
learning is nothing more or
less than traversing them.
In the same way that you
become proficient in a piece of
music by playing its notes in
order in an expressive way-
that is, traversing its connections-you become proficient
in a subject by participating
in it. You see and appreciate
the connections inherent in

NA * iEEE SpEctrum * DEcEmbEr 2012

By paul mcFedries

the subject, even creating
new connections based on
your experience.
This learning-by-doing
approach has been called
activity theory, and it's
finding a home in many
21st-century learning
environments because
technology makes it so much
easier to actively engage
in a subject's connective
knowledge. For example,
you can document your
learning in a free blog hosted
by Blogger or WordPress;
you can engage other people
who are also learning (or have
already learned) the topic
through Facebook or Twitter;
you can use online resources
to store and share bookmarks
related to the field; you can
even create your own wiki.
Alternatively, you can sign
up for a MOOC, a massive
open online course. MOOCs
are free, open to anyone,
and designed to handle an
extremely large number of
students. You might think
that MOOCs would cover
only esoteric subjects offered
by obscure schools, but that's
not the case. Such august
institutions as MIT, Harvard,
Stanford, Princeton, and
Caltech have offered online
courses recently. These are
not off-curriculum pet projects but rather actual degree
courses offered simultaneously to a few tuition-paying
students on campus and
to thousands of would-be
learners auditing online. (At
least for now, only the tuition
payers earn credits toward
a degree.) Most of these
courses get a few thousand
online participants, although
an artificial-intelligence
MOOC given by Stanford in
late 2011 filled a whopping
160 000 virtual seats.

The materials created
for these courses are called
OpenCourseWare. They
are "open" in the sense that
they're shared freely online,
although they tend, at least
at the MOOCs run by those
big-time institutions, to have
fairly rigid frameworks in
which the materials themselves are defined in advance
and are unchanged as the
course progresses. However,
other MOOCs-particularly those run by private
companies such as Udacity-
tend to incorporate open
design principles that enable
participants to control what
they learn, how they learn it,
and whom they interact with
during the course. In this way,
the MOOC becomes a kind
of network of learners who
spontaneously form new connections and even help direct
the course and its objectives.
Of course, MOOCs have
their detractors. Some call
them monstrous open online
courses. They complain
that they're chaotic and
prevent meaningful studentteacher interaction and, if
expanded to any meaningful
degree, will lead to mere
broadcast education and
ultimately to an undefined
MOOCopalypse.
Until recently, e-learning
was most prominently
associated with the novelty
degree-a degree from a
nonexistent university or
college (or sometimes a fake
degree from an existing
university or college). Now
we might be heading into
a golden age of virtual
education, where highquality courses are available
to everyone and not just those
who can afford US $40 000 a
year for tuition. Now that's a
tune I'd like to study.
o
spectrum.ieee.org

Roman muRadov

technically speaking
http://spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum December, 2012
