Are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Enabling A New Pedagogy?

Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been with us since 1998 when the first MOOC - Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (also known as CCK08) - was offered. CCK08, led by George Siemens of Athabasca University, and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council, included 25 tuition-paying students in Extended Education at the University of Manitoba, as well as over 2,200 online students from the general public who paid nothing. By 2012, MOOCs were hot news. In 2011 and 2012, for-profit organizations, such as Udacity, edX, and Coursera, worked with universities, colleges, and other partners to launch numerous MOOCs that registered hundreds of thousands of students, and caught the imagination of many more. Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times a year later, suggested: “I can see a day soon where you’ll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world — some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh — paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion. It will change teaching, learning and the pathway to employment. There is a new world unfolding and everyone will have to adapt.” MOOCs were the new “magic bullet” that would transform access to, and costs of, higher education and, maybe, show the way in which lifelong learning – always part of the educational dream – could become a reality. However, there are few signs, in North America at least, of MOOCs having the transformative power that Friedman imagined. We pose five questions about what changes MOOCs might be engendering in post-secondary education and how this is enabling a new pedagogy. While answers to each question are still evolving, some preliminary observations from experience and the literature can be offered.