MOOCs: A short history

MOOCs are massive open online courses offered by content providers/aggregators and/or well-reputed universities to digitally connected students worldwide. Their objective: unlimited enrolment and open access via the internet.

History. The acronym MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier of the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada for an online course offered by the University of Manitoba. The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course designed by Manitoba professors George Siemens and Stephen Downes was free and open to the general public who could access video lectures, readings, and participate in discussion forums online.

However it was not until 2011, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston (MIT) launched the world’s largest collection of free-of-charge opencourseware, that Moocs captured the attention of academics and educators worldwide.

Subsequently in 2012, MIT and Harvard founded the edX platform for the promotion of Moocs. In 2012, another Moocs experiment caught academics’ attention. Two Stanford University professors, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, uploaded a free online course ‘Introduction to artificial intelligence’ for which 160,000 students from 190 countries signed up — the first time, an open online course became truly ‘massive’. This successful experiment encouraged Prof. Thrun to found the first for-profit Moocs provider Udacity. This was followed by the founding of Coursera by Stanford professors Dr. Daphne Koller and Dr. Andre Ng.

Currently over 40 Moocs providers are offering online courses of 500 universities to 35 million students worldwide, including 2 million in India.

Enrolment, teaching-learning and assessment. Moocs differ from formal study/degree programmes of universities — they are essentially short-term supplementary courses which enrich the academic programmes of college/university students and upgrade the knowledge and skills of working professionals. For instance journalism students and/or working journalists are free to register for a five-week course ‘What is News’ offered by the University of Michigan on the Moocs platform www.coursera.org. Enrolment is easy, requiring students to sign up with an email address and password. The time commitment is two-four hours per week.

Once enrolled, you have access to video lectures (15-20 minutes) delivered by Michigan faculty, course reading material, and online discussion forums. Students can choose ‘audit only’ (free access to the full course but no completion certificate) or ‘purchase course’ (pay for a completion certificate). Assessment is through quizzes, multiple-choice tests (auto-grading) and peer reviews (submitted assignments are reviewed by peers).

Generally, a Moocs certificate won’t qualify students to earn academic credits at a university, unless specifically stated. There are no prerequisite qualifications required for enrolment in any Moocs programme. The range of courses offered is wide. For instance edX offers courses in arts and humanities, STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), law, business management, among other disciplines.

Fees. Registration and enrolment is free as is accessing the course curriculum and lectures with students paying only for certification. Charges for certification range from Rs.1,710-68,394.