Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: MOOC

From Hack Education
Audrey Watters
December 3, 2012

The Year of the MOOC

...it’s not surprising that 2012 was dominated by MOOCs as the trend started to really pick up in late 2011...

...obstacles to the adoption of and accreditation for MOOCs by the university establishment were (are) still overwhelming enough that Dave Cormier listed (MIT and) MOOCs as one of his “black swans for education in 2012” when he made his education predictions for the year. (A “black swan” is an unexpected, but game-changing event.)...

...Back to Cormier, the guy who coined the term “MOOC” back in 2008, long before Stanford’s massively-hyped online artificial intelligence class. That’s an important piece of education technology history that’s been overlooked a lot this year as Sebastian Thrun and his Stanford colleagues have received most of the credit in the mainstream press for “inventing” the MOOC.

But MOOCs have a longer history, dating back to some of the open online learning experiments conducted by Cormier, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Alec Couros, David Wiley and others. Downes and Siemens’ 2008 class "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,”for example, was offered to some 20-odd tuition-paying students at the University of Manitoba, along with over 2300 who signed up for a free and open version online.

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Noreen's note: I enrolled in the first MOOC led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes and enjoyed it for a while. Alas! I, like so many others, did not complete the course. (Forgive me?) I still believe that what George Siemens was onto with connectivism is what we are going to be more and more focused on in the future.