2200 people took part in a course on Connectivism last term, but only 24 paid and got academic credit – but I do like those figures and that model. It is a great way to reconcile two things which are important in education – that it should be available as widely as possible but that the people and institutions that offer certification need to be supported. They coined a new phrase – MOOC; Massive Open Online Course – and I hope it is a model we will see more of in the near future.
The idea of the MOOC reconciles two different models of education in the digital age. One is the new, open, free model made possible by open educational resources in which students can have their own personal learning environment in which they mashup resources to support their personal learning journey and a portfolio in which they gather the artifacts that map their progress. The other is the old, campus and module based industrial model in which thousands of students produce bad transcripts of what their lecturer said. One is active, one is passive, and I am obviously biased in favour of the new and against the old – except my paycheck comes from the old model.
I did try to run an online course (an Irish History survey) many years ago and discovered that our university had no way to calculate how much it should charge one student to take one 5 ECTS credit module so we couldn’t register people and we couldn’t give credit. From what I’m learning in faculty meetings about our new costing mechanisms, it is clear that we still don’t know what it costs, which is remarkable but not so important. I think if more institutions support MOOCs, a pricing model for the ‘for credit’ portion will emerge in due course.
Where MOOCs will win big over existing online courses is in the openness of the materials. Most online courses on offer have their content hidden behind closed systems, and however much one might trust the insituttion, I always wonder about what is hidden behind those walls. With the MOOC model, once it has been set up, you can see what is there, and get a very clear feel for what you might pay for – and that will encourage people who need those qualifications formally accredited.  I didn’t ‘take’ the Massive Open Online Course on Connectivism organised by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, but I am gradually picking through the materials. I think MOOCs will gradually squeeze out closed online courses, and universities, both public and private, have a vested interest in supporting them.
I’d love to put on a few MOOCs in my areas but a major problem is the availability of open content – there is a lot of good material out there on the web, but in some domains, signficant amounts of important material are not yet digitised, or behind sopyright walls to protect an outdated model of academic publishing. In Irish History, there are some books and articles which are vital for understanding how historical debates in the field developed since 1900 which are not even digitised, much less open. In my other area of teaching, military history, key articles about the ‘Military Revolution’ are locked in copyright, and while you can ask people taking a course to buy some books, journal article access for people who are not inside the walls of a university is complex.
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