MOOCs: Evolution and Revolution Kenneth Ronkowitz, New Jersey Institute of Technology, United States

Lynnette Condro Ronkowitz, Consultant, Ronkowitz LLC

ABSTRACT This chapter introduces the evolution of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) using narratives that are documented by research generated from the educational community. This research concentrates on the history and progression of distance learning and its movement toward online education. The authors’ perspectives focus on their own anecdotal evolution from traditional classroom teaching to their infusion of distance and online learning and, most recently, designing and teaching in a MOOC setting. In examining whether the MOOC is more of an evolution or a revolution in learning, they explore some of the questions that have emerged about MOOCs including what distinguishes this model from other online offerings, the characteristics of learners who succeed in this environment, and the debates regarding best practices. Critical reaction and the responses by proponents of this learning format are presented and acknowledged. The research, perspectives and debates clearly impact what the future of the MOOC appears to offer. This continues the discussion within the book section ‘RIA and education practice of MOOCs,’ aligning to the discussion on the topic of ‘educational training design.’ INTRODUCTION In the evolution of online learning, the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an asteroid that has hit the world of education. The dust has yet to settle but as in all debates, the MOOC is being embraced and feared in very much the same way that technology enhanced and threatened various roles in corporations, small businesses and schools. The MOOC is both part of the evolution of online learning as well as a revolution potentially threatening to disrupt the existing educational models for access to learning as well as the ways in which to validate that learning for advancement. While they offer opportunities for higher education, they also threaten the tuition, credit and degree programs that have been at the center of universities for centuries. Education is certainly in the forefront of discussions around the world. At the January, 2014 World Economic Conference (WEF), education was part of several Open Forum Panel discussions (WEF 2014). This invitation-only annual meeting held by the WEF in the eastern Alps region of Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, 22 - 25 January 2014, focuses on global concerns. In the video streams of Open Forum Davos 2014, there was a panel called ‘Higher Education-Investment or Waste?’ (WEF) moderated by David Callaway, Editor-in-Chief of USA Today (USA TODAY). One panel participant was Zach Sims (WEF), who was introduced as a 23-year-

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old entrepreneur who dropped out of Columbia University in the City of New York to be the CEO and co-founder of a company called Codecademy (WEF). This company offers online courses for people who want or need to learn computer coding for their career (Codecademy). The panel questioned whether traditional higher education is worth the cost and debated the alternatives. Sims argued that “the universities are facing competition from the free market from companies like ours [Codecademy and Coursera] and they [the universities] will become better and will provide alternatives to people” (WEF). The panel was optimistic that change would come to higher education, both in cost and structure; the entire panel agreed that tertiary education in some new form will remain pertinent in the global market. After a period for audience questions and participation, the majority of the audience, during an informal poll, voted that MOOCs are a revolution. (WEF) Most technological change involves massive disruption whereas economic ‘bubbles’, like the trillion-dollar student loan bubble in the U.S., tend to burst, not slowly deflate. Initially, the disruption of the MOOC may have appeared to be a rapid revolution just a few years ago, but it seems more likely to become a gradual evolution over the course of the next decade. The year 2012 had been designated as the “Year of the MOOC” by The New York Times and much of the popular media. The following year was then sarcastically dubbed the “Year of the MOOC Hype” (Kelly, 2014). With that behind us, we are in a period that will determine the true value and place for MOOCs. This evolutionary stage in the development of online learning may have a greater revolutionary impact on the way it changes how we educate and validate learning inside and outside educational institutions. What are the new rules that will accompany these possible new models in education? Public universities and for-profit institutions have been offering fully online degree programs for several decades. If one of the goals of some organizations offering MOOCs is to provide degrees either through partnerships with established universities or by the universities themselves, then MOOCs are another way of continuing that work. However, if the MOOC becomes an actual ‘alternative’ to the courses, degree programs and the traditional university itself, then we have a revolution. This chapter discusses some big questions in understanding the role of the MOOC. The comparison of traditional learning with MOOCs will answer many questions about what they are and identify the characteristics that distinguish MOOCs from what until now has been considered typical online learning. At the same time, it will raise more questions about the structure of current education and the progressive nature of the MOOC. The perspective of the authors is one derived from more than thirty years in the traditional classroom environment of American secondary and post-secondary education in several disciplines. They have also designed and taught courses that were fully online and in the hybrid or blended modes. They have been enrolled in online courses offered by institutions in the U.S., Canada, and France, and have designed and taught open online courses of varying sizes even before the term MOOC was being widely used. They consider themselves educators and lifelong learners.

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BACKGROUND MINITEL Just as the backstory of the MOOC will be discussed from a historical progression of distance learning, there is also a backstory about how the authors of this chapter made the leap and began to incorporate the Internet into their face-to-face (F2F) classes. In 1994, when France was using the Minitel (Médium interactif par numérisation d'information téléphonique) primarily as an online phone book, shopping catalog and train schedule, the Minitel terminals were available free in France as well as in its territories and countries where French was a primary language. The French Embassy in New York made software available free to Americans (Mac or PC) with a minute-by-minute charge for phone use as long as a modem was available. Lynnette received a grant (LEF) to take advantage of the opportunity and received some funding for the phone charges. By sheer coincidence, her class immediately connected with a small group of French speaking 15 year olds in Morocco who, when they were not in class, were on their Minitel terminals, chatting and gossiping and joking, typical of adolescents. After introductions were made, they invited her and her advanced class to join one of their circles. They were shocked that there was a charge for the American students since Minitel was free of charge for them and they also revealed that they owned personal computers but the government had not made ‘the Internet’ available to them. Once the Internet became viable, they planned to abandon their Minitel terminals. The two groups would meet synchronously online during some mutually agreed upon time and would discuss movies, academics, culture and current events. The Moroccan students made it very clear that their presence on the Minitel would disappear during vacations since they had better things to do with their time off. Towards the end of the school year, they were rarely available since some of the older students were preparing for the BAC (baccalaureate exam) and the advanced French class had to prepare for their AP (Advanced Placement) exam. The Moroccans were also going to be able to check their results for the BAC online while the American students were going to have to wait until their school counselors notified them of their AP results through ‘snail mail’ during the summer. Despite the fact that both groups of students moved on the following year and they all lost contact with each other, Lynnette was already immersed in the international connectivity and collaboration that would eventually be fostered by the MOOC. THINKQUEST That same year, a notice was distributed to teachers that a contest sponsored by ThinkQuest.org was available for students to work collaboratively online on an education project of their choosing and prizes would be awarded by a panel of judges in various categories. The idea was to promote collaboration and diversity at a distance and was a way of ‘testing the waters’ of the power of the Internet.

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Since Lynnette had already had a successful experience online, a new group of students began to investigate the parameters of the contest with the idea that they would try to bring the connectivism and community that had been experienced the previous year not just into their school, but also into their own community in New Jersey (NJ). At the time, the rules of the contest required that all students be attending American schools. Reaching out to the Moroccans who had friends at the American school where they lived did not work out and since they could only communicate using the Minitel (Internet was still not available to them in any other form), it was too costly for the American students learning French to pursue the project. Coincidentally, Ken became interested in ThinkQuest when he was contacted by a colleague, from another part of NJ, whose student wanted to collaborate with students from other parts of the USA on the creation of a website about motion pictures. They needed a teacher coach who could work online with a student they had found in Texas who wanted to join their team. Having seen the results of the sense of community promoted by the Minitel grant, Ken, who had a background in film, accepted the coach role for ThinkQuest. After almost a year of working collaboratively, ‘online only’, the team became the 1997 first place winners in this international competition and finally met each other in person at the awards ceremony held that year in Washington D.C. (ThinkQuest 1997 Challenge). Besides the scholarship money and recognition received, the student and teacher participants all became intrigued by the collaborative learning opportunities that the Internet could offer. Ken continued to coach teams for several years, including another group that created a website on endangered species that took the gold award in the science category for middle school (ThinkQuest 1999 Challenge). These early experiences in connectivism, knowledge, collaboration and community online and in the classroom started the authors on the path that led in a few years to their involvement in distance learning and online education. Ken served in the capacity as computer coordinator at his school for several years during which time he helped individual teachers get used to using a computer in the classroom, instructing them and troubleshooting. In 2000, Ken left full-time teaching for a position in instructional design and social media but continues to teach in a university setting. At New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Ken was responsible for managing instructional design for all academic and corporate online courses. His staff launched fully online degree programs and graduate certificates (http://humanities.njit.edu/academics/graduate/ms-ptc.php) and (http://adultlearner.njit.edu/programs/certificates.php). He introduced podcasting of course materials by NJIT and then introduced NJIT as one of the original 16 iTunes U universities offering open courses (Colleges & Universities on iTunes U). He later introduced OpenCourseware (http://ocw.njit.edu/) based on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) model (http://ocw.mit.edu). Finally, he was influential in transitioning NJIT from a commercial learning management system product to Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, Moodle Partners). Prior to the term MOOC being used, he enrolled in open courses through P2PU, Arrow of Time Milestones MOOC, Coursera/Penn, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Stanford Online, A

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Crash Course on Creativity and Open SUNY, Locating, Creating and Utilizing OERs. It was when Canvas Network (Canvas, Inc.) reached out to NJEdge (NJEdge.net) for a contact to teach one of their MOOCs, that Ken was asked to teach Academia & the MOOC (2013) in Canvas (https://www.canvas.net). He collaborated with Lynnette and another instructional designer, Mary Zedeck (Seton Hall University, NJ). Lynnette and Ken both registered for the course Online Pedagogy through Canvas for first time online teachers, mostly for the MOOC experience. Their final project was a collaboration among a theology/ history teacher from Michigan, USA and a corporate trainer from France. They put together a lesson using e-pedagogy from the course that incorporated theology, French language, current events and literature. Lynnette was then invited to register for a French MOOC, ITypa Saison 2: Internet: Tout y est Pour Apprendre (itypa.mooc.fr). In their Academia & the MOOC course, there were certain questions that participants found central to the consideration of using Massive Open Online Courses, or any variation of them, on their campuses and this chapter will look at some of those questions.

DISTANCE EDUCATION In telling the history of the MOOC, the backstory encapsulates how distance education developed into online learning. Distance education dates back to private correspondence courses that were offered in advertisements in the Boston Gazette as early as 1728 by Caleb Phillips. The University Of London was the first school to offer its degrees worldwide in 1858. College courses were also offered by radio in the 1940′s and were incorporating television in the 1950s (Lepi, 2013). In the 1960s-70s, movements in education, especially at the pre-university level, such as the use of manipulatives in mathematics and the open classroom movement, suggested models for a learning process that was more student-centered, but was still controlled by the teacher. In 1969, Open University was established in the UK which again used radio and television to deliver courses (Lepi). The technology of the 1980s and early 1990s allowed course materials, now including recorded lectures, to be mailed to students on VHS tapes and CDs. If the learning appeared ‘student-centered’, it was mostly because the teacher had no way to direct learning other than to give assignments and make due dates. Both Lynnette and Ken enrolled in a course available through St. Peters College in New Jersey. It involved watching a series of VHS tapes about Assertive Discipline Techniques by Lee Canter (Canter, n.d.), completing an exercise booklet and writing a paper. Their school district approved and gave three graduate credits for the course which advanced them on the salary guide. Shortly afterward, the Board of Education stopped allowing credit for video courses because concerns were raised about the quality of the material, the method used to evaluate the work and whether or not it could be proven that the individuals enrolled had actually done the work themselves. This is also a topic that will be addressed in another part of the chapter. Ironically, their concerns were not unfounded because Ken’s work

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and documentation got lost in the mail and since there were no back-up copies in those days, he went through a difficult time trying to prove that he had submitted all the requirements. Instructional Television (ITV) emerged next as a way to offer lectures and content. These licensed channels could deliver live or pre-recorded instruction to multiple sites within a school district or to branch campuses at universities. This was considered synchronous communication or instruction because they gave the impression of being ‘live’. They could be integrated into the classroom setting and often included teachers’ guides that could help with the use of the program in the instructors’ lessons. Lynnette used the video series French in Action (FIA) produced by Yale University and WGBH Boston in collaboration with Wellesley College. (French in Action n.d.) The set of over twenty VHS tapes were paid for by her school district. The series gave the illusion of being interactive since the actor/professor (Pierre Capretz, Yale University) spoke directly to the camera while teaching and then cut to video clips from television and movies for use as reinforcement examples that appeared to be happening live, very much in a soap opera fashion. There was also a simulated class of students who would sometimes interact on the television screen with this professor and there were times when the television audience was asked to participate by repeating or pronouncing. Once again there were inklings of the potential for future ways to teach, learn, connect and collaborate outside the physical classroom. It was not until 1998 that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) permitted two-way operations which created the potential for instructional material to be interactive with the program and the learner. This allowed for course offerings in schools where not enough students were enrolled in a course in order for it to run independently. The school would provide funds to connect via satellite to a host school and this two-way communication along with a teacher facilitator allowed students to ask questions and hold discussions with their host in real-time. Technology moved very quickly with the advent of broadband and wireless communications allowing for data services to begin connecting to the Internet. The road to wireless and wireless networking began allowing ITV to truly become synchronous or live.

ONLINE LEARNING The early days of the Internet are what transitioned distance learning into online learning. The use of ‘the Net’ added a number of new elements and greatly facilitated the delivery of course content. The paper mail or ‘snail mail’ that had been a key element of the correspondence model of distance education for a century was transformed by ‘electronic mail’ (email). Many online courses were, and still are, asynchronous, meaning that communication took place outside of real time and there was a lag between the message sent by the learner and the response to it by the instructor. It was also private and not visible to the entire body of students. There became opportunities as bandwidth increased to stream video and have synchronous (live) lectures, meetings and discussions through mediums such as video conferencing and Skype. Probably the most significant addition was the ability to conduct online discussions. This became possible through the programming provided by online learning management systems (LMS) in text message fashion similar to cell phones. There was still a lag in that not everyone would be ‘logged-in’ at the same time, but the discussion could be followed and thoughts could be added or ‘posted’. Adding and following posts or threaded discussion moved some of the control away

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from the teacher, and it finally increased the ‘student-to-student’ interaction that had always existed in the physical classroom. Still, many online courses remain textbook-based and the relationship between teacher and student often remains the most important even though it is online. In the United States, between 2002 and 2008, the number of classes being taken online rose by 187%. In 2009, over four million students were taking some type of online course. In 2013, one in four Australian students, or about 298,000 were learning off campus (Lepi, 2013). This was also a time when social media began to make a greater impact on courses both online and F2F, as teachers began to use it as a part of the design of their courses and students used it to create their own Personal Learning Environments (PLE), a topic which will be described in a separate section of this chapter. MOOCs Large-scale, free online education, Open Education Resources (OER) and open courseware have a longer history than MOOCs. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare was initiated as a new way to disseminate knowledge. They also saw this as a way to create a shared intellectual commons or Open Access (OA) in academia to foster collaboration across MIT and among other scholars. OA is online, free of charge, and removes most of the price barriers and permission barriers for use of material. This was the most difficult part of the process for the university to work out. There were logistical challenges of ownership and intellectual property for items within the course materials as well as technical challenges of converting materials to an online format. Nevertheless, in September 2002, the MIT OpenCourseWare site opened to the public with 50 offerings. However, these are not considered courses or MOOCs because there is no teacher, facilitator, discussion forum, assignment, feedback, grades or record of any work completed. Possibly, part of the message with this project was that having access to MIT materials did not equate with the value of actually getting credit for an MIT course (Clark, 2013). This initiative, however, could be perceived as the precursor to the MOOC. PURE MOOCs Throughout this discussion about online learning, one can see that changes in online technology have obviously been the catalyst for the changes that contributed to the evolution of e-learning. At the point in the history where the term MOOC was coined, there is a sense that the reader might want to know exactly which example qualifies as the first MOOC while this chapter continues pointing out partial elements or missing elements in some of those examples. These previous examples serve to create a bridge that extends from learning simply being available online, to the concepts and visions for disseminating knowledge in new ways online (pedagogy) and now to the definition and parameters of a pure MOOC. When the term was coined, it was not simply meant to be Massive Open Online Course. Here are some of the parameters that highlight the distinctions.

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Massive implies numbers as well as diversity. Much of what has been written revolves around the growing number of participants in online learning, but there is yet to be a discussion that includes diversity and the global impact of these initiatives. Open(ness) alludes to free: free for registration, free for operation, free for materials, free for participation, free for sharing, open syllabus, open space for multiple threads of belief co-existing in a course. The first pure MOOCs were considered ‘open’ but in two different respects. First, they were open enrollment to students outside the hosting university – an ‘open registration’. Open registration resulted in enrollment becoming massive, hence, the numbers. Second, the materials of the courses were licensed using Creative Commons (CC) licenses so that their materials could be remixed and reused by others, as in ‘open license’. The amount of materials and their uses became another incarnation for the term ‘massive’. Online has been the core of the discussion as evidenced so far in the chapter and there are massive amounts of changes borne by the changes in technology. Course redefines the structure of content being applied to the Internet, its scalability and the pedagogy used to make it a good online class. While maintaining these four elements, the ‘purpose’ behind a MOOC has had a significant impact on their evolution, creating different types.

xMOOC stands for extended. It lays out common ground in a field with opportunities for self-remediating. It is more teacher-centered. An xMOOC tends to have the largest number of enrollees.

cMOOC stands for connectivist, where people can fail together, cheat together, rob from their betters with open research; the connectivism of working on something in the open with people who have a common interest which can help one see clearer. The discovery of common interest leads participants to band together within the MOOC itself to learn the things they want/need to learn. Mooc.fr--saison 2, considered itself to be a cMOOC.

vMOOC stands for vocational. There are companies using their influence to create courses that their employees, clients and service providers can learn from and use to improve their skill levels. It gives people a chance to break into a field of knowledge. Sometimes the association with a company labels these as brandMOOCs as well.

James J. O'Donnell (2012) wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I think I taught the first MOOC in history. It was the spring of 1994” (para. 1). He was referring to a standard level course which he would be teaching that semester at Georgetown University whose topic was about the life and thought of St. Augustine of Hippo (O’Donnell, 2005). Instead of being limited to the paid registrants, he decided to see what would happen if he opened it to the world online. In a time when the first graphical Web browsers, Mosaic (NCSA Mosaic which was later renamed Netscape Navigator) had just been released and network connections were uncommon,

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his course used ‘primitive’ technology. Gopher, an early Internet protocol, was used to deliver the syllabus and texts. Discussion occurred via a Listserv e-mail list. The course was promoted using several e-mail lists of people with interests similar to the humanist course content. O’Donnell reported (2012) that 500 people signed up. He utilized his advanced tuition-paying students to summarize and post content from the F2F seminars, which served to start the online discussions. The participation in the course varied. “Hundreds listened, a few dozen participated, a couple of dozen participated very actively, including some remarkable people” (O’Donnell). The term ‘MOOC’ was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier (Cormier, 2008) and Bryan Alexander (Parr 2013) in response to an earlier open online course that had been designed and led by George Siemens and Stephen Downes called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (2008). Cormier and Alexander’s MOOC had 25 tuition-paying students at the University of Manitoba, Canada, in addition to 2,300 other students from the public who took the online class free of charge for no credit. The course content was available through RSS feeds, and participants used threaded discussions in Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) [LMS], blog posts, Second Life (a virtual world), and synchronous online meetings. There have been claims by other people of having offered a MOOC prior to Downes and Siemens and the eventual coinage of the acronym. David Wiley (Fall, 2007. Utah State University) had offered a similarly structured course entitled Introduction to Open Education. Other offerings were designed for corporate training and used their own proprietary platform. For example, ALISON (Advance Learning Interactive Systems Online) in 2007 focused on vocational training across several continents. ALISON, (Capernaum Limited), CEO Mike Feerick (2007), was inspired by reading a book about Google (Google, Inc.) that discussed spreading education to larger audiences and the possibility of providing self-paced education and skills training online at no cost to the learner (High, 2013). Much of that history is more concerned with technology and delivery rather than the pedagogy of teaching massive numbers in an online setting. PEDAGOGY During the decade prior to the first MOOC offerings, there had been a movement to use more monologist teaching and less dialogic learning. This represented a shift from "the sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side." (King, 1993) In this movement, teachers are often seen as facilitators, guides, coaches and mentors rather than lecturers at the center of the course experience. This means that pedagogy began to evolve as well. Evidence-based learning, and project-based learning (PBL), and total physical response (TPR) as well as ‘journaling’ began to move students to the center and make them responsible for their own learning. For example, with TPR in a second-language class, students would be paired and would each have a card with a picture or a command depicting an activity. As the model group mimed their activity, the rest of the class would observe them. While watching, they would have to explain verbally what they saw each person doing by stating in the target language that “Joe and Mary are reading”; “Kevin and Sue are playing tennis.” The instructor could use this to teach three different concepts depending on the language level. They could practice the one of the past tenses by saying that “Joe was reading a book” and “Kevin was throwing a ball.” Or the objective could have been to use a conjunction indicating that two activities were happening at the same time

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(while) or another conjunction to contrast that two different activities were taking place at the same time (whereas). The class could also practice writing by journaling the activities. Once the objective for the first set of activities would be identified, the subsequent pairs of student demonstrations would be totally student-centered. They would demonstrate, talk and monitor each other’s errors; the instructor would simply be handing out new cards and only intervene when students indicated. If there is an approach toward a new paradigm in pedagogy, it will be because the ‘student to student’ and the ‘teacher to student’ relationships are changing. The increasing presence of community in education makes learning less of an isolated activity. The corresponding changes in online learning pedagogy occurred because of Web 2.0. With its emphasis on media, Web 2.0 became an approach in the early 2000’s which allowed online learning to become interactive. It refers to changes in the way web pages are made. The emphasis is shifted to consumers becoming the producers of content, allowing for the same interactive networking concept that began to enliven educational activities in F2F classes. Wikis, blogs (web-logging or journaling online), YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other networks created learning communities on the Web and permitted greater personalized meaning and socialized connectivity. The key factor in its impact on the evolution of online learning is that Web 2.0 allows for data and knowledge to be exchanged. Knowledge is no longer just sent out or just retrieved. The MOOC was not created because of technology, but because of a desire to use theories of connectivism. Connectivism greatly increases the relationships among students and makes them not only responsible for their own learning but for the learning of their fellow students. It can take the previously described TPR activity and send it from a class of 24 students to any number of language learners who could learn the concepts the same way by communicating through posts, discussions, tweets and all the while monitoring each other’s errors. Because of the massive numbers in MOOCs, using connectivism requires automated processes and crowd sourcing which some have termed ‘accidental communities’, communities of teachers and learners that work together in a collaborative and supportive fashion despite the structures officially set up by their institution (Lowenstein, 2014). The Minitel and ThinkQuest experiences had elements of accidental communities, particularly ThinkQuest. They were small, but the groups were collaborative, working outside their institutions or schools. Minitel actually had the support of one of the French systems operators who monitored the exchanges from Paris. He thought the connectivity was special and therefore helped with technology glitches whereas ThinkQuest used email to communicate problems, but also had a forum where teams could post issues that they were encountering and get support from the other groups. These were hints of what was yet to evolve. Like the early online courses, some of the first MOOCs had a minimalist structure. Typically, they were asynchronous presentations and lectures using audio, video, and slides, threaded discussion questions, additional resources, assignments, and activities. Pedagogically, much of the course activity, interaction and collaboration in these MOOCs were expected to come from the participants. It was also expected that this student-to-student interaction would drive the curriculum. In some courses, even the course structure itself emerged from the exchange between the participants. Discussions consisted of participants reflecting on the concepts among themselves and sharing new resources.

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MOOC PROVIDERS A lot of attention was given to MOOCs in 2012 because they were being offered by many of America’s elite universities, eventually in partnerships with new companies. If 2012 was the year of the MOOC, then the year probably started with Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist and professor at Stanford University and Google VP (2011), who made headlines early that year when he left his teaching position to start Udacity (Salmon, 2012). The company was based on the outcomes of having taught the artificial intelligence course that he had offered as a MOOC the previous year. After tens of thousands of students had taken that course online, he decided to work with two other Stanford colleagues, who had also been trying out MOOCs, in order to create a company that would offer free online courses as part of a for-profit venture. Besides Udacity, Coursera Inc., another for-profit company, also came from Stanford University roots to offer online courses for a large audience. By late 2012, the company reported that more than 1,900,241 students from 196 countries had enrolled in at least one course. There is also edX, a not-for-profit online education initiative using courses provided by MIT and Harvard University and eventually, the UC Berkeley and others. The delivery platform is open-source which means that other institutions and organizations can use the platform to host their own course offerings. But this newer group of courses offered by these companies is distinct from the original MOOCs. They are not pure MOOCs in that they are ‘open’ only in their registration or only in the use of the open-source platform. The courses do not have open licenses and the content is not meant to be shared.

A MOOC BUSINESS MODEL The emergence of business models for how to turn a profit is one sure sign that a concept is trending in education (Ronkowitz, 2012). Open characteristics are still present in some courses offered as a MOOC but the business models that have emerged for these courses have caused a reduction in some of the other characteristics of openness. Companies are being formed to provide paid services to colleges for how to use those ‘free’tools, e.g. other free, open source products like the Moodle LMS can be totally free, but the user has the option to choose a Moodle Partners (Moodle HQ) or Certified Service Providers. The LMS is free but there can be hosting service charges, charges for installation, as well as value-added services if customization and content development is required. This has also happened with MOOC providers hoping to make their courses and their ‘graduates’ more credible to employers and traditional schools. This business model has forged partnerships, such as edX with Pearson VUE’s (Pearson PLC) testing centers in order to administer proctored exams for edX’s online courses. Students who pass these proctored exams may find it easier to get credit from their own degree-granting institution (Ronkowitz, 2012). They will not get credit from edX’s partner universities, but that is probably something that edX and other providers will want to pursue. It is too early to say which business models will prevail. According to Daphne Koller (WEF, Coursera, Inc.), it takes six years for a business model to be proven and most MOOC providers are only in their second year.

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ISSUES EMERGING FROM THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MOOCS Many of the concerns and issues that have emerged in the conversations about MOOCs are ones that colleges have been dealing with since the start of formal education. For example, concerns with academic integrity, cheating and plagiarism have always been an issue. Distance learning and the introduction of online learning made it necessary to deal with these issues in new ways. The MOOC takes these issues and multiplies them by many thousands. Without the advent of Web 2.0, the Internet ran the risk of becoming a giant online library. MOOCs run the risk of being just another way to present good old-fashioned lectures (GOFL). The rest of this chapter will address some of these issues. What are the characteristics of a good MOOC? A good MOOC has many of the characteristics of a good online course. A good teacher is always the heart of a good learning experience in the classroom, in the lecture hall, and online. Despite the de-emphasis on the single teacher in front of a room that a MOOC demands, the online instructor is still important to a good course. We believe that one characteristic in recognizing a good teacher is the mastery of questioning techniques. The instructor needs to demonstrate the ability to ask questions in multiple ways and at multiple levels in order for the student to trigger connections. At the same time, it is important to respect the intelligence of the students and thread their responses in a way that will guide their train of thought. Online, this translates to the discussion board and the quality and number of posts that are elicited. Teachers in traditional classrooms have always been content creators and designers for their courses. Instead of eliminating teaching positions, the rise of online learning created the job of ‘instructional designer’ (ID) and though often associated with online courses, the job scope of the ID has too often become one of technology support rather than the actual designer of instruction. In a good MOOC, the teacher has a strong involvement in the design of the course. Besides questioning techniques, the second criterion for a good online teacher includes the good use of proper technology. The learning technologies used need to be as user-friendly and as reliable as possible. This is one way that the pressures of MOOCs on existing infrastructure may help build better systems for any type of online learning. The teacher or group of people involved in the instruction, as is often the case in a large MOOC, should be properly trained in online delivery and methodologies. They need to compensate for the lack of a physical presence by creating a supportive environment. Just as online instructors should have taken online courses themselves before teaching online, MOOC instructors should have experiences as learners in MOOCs before leading one. With a potentially large and diverse global group of participants, additional consideration must be given to the curriculum. Since learners in a truly open course will have very different backgrounds and knowledge, there must be ways to evaluate or self-evaluate in order to identify gaps in prior knowledge that will hinder a student’s progress in the course. Even without sophisticated adaptive learning methods, students can take pre-tests and be given options to use other resources or alternative coursework before entering the MOOC. While in the MOOC, if the learner discovers a gap that hinders understanding in order to continue, there needs to be an

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option that directs this learner to the necessary resources. Sometimes this will come from the other participants. Delivery is also an important factor and it has two meanings in online education. In a F2F class, the success of an instructor often equated to their own personal delivery method. An analogy would be telling a joke. Certain comedians deliver their material and success is measured by the amount of laughter or applause. Another person can deliver the same jokes, but they fall flat or are not well received. We have had colleagues borrow lessons that were very successful with our students, but the results were not the same. We admit that it could be audience, but delivery of the content by the instructor is more likely the reason since we had already used that content successfully with varying groups, sometimes five in one day. Delivery online is impacted by the instructor as well. Most success comes when the instructor establishes a ‘presence’ online, through hearing their voice or seeing a picture or their face at some time during a video lecture. Interactivity is the second driver for an online presence. On the other hand, delivery online also means delivery of the product. Whatever platform and technology an institution uses currently for more traditional online learning, scalability must be considered in offering a MOOC. Can the LMS that supports classes of 15 to 100 now take on 150,000 participants? How will registration be handled? Will it be reliable? What staff will support students or will support be only online resources and peer-support? Although a good MOOC allows people to create their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE), teachers and designers need to plan for that to be possible. The teaching style should be learner-centered so that there is a predisposition to recognizing that each student has many learning styles and comfort levels with technology. The PLE is what distinguishes a MOOC from lecture-learning and lecture-listening. Personal Learning Environment (PLE) The PLE is central to learning in the future. It is what allows a person to become a life-long learner because it is an ongoing process. It is not a technical question but an educational one although “changing technologies are key drivers in educational change” (Attwell, 2007). The individual has a role in organizing, developing and controlling his own learning. This takes a huge commitment and maturity on the part of the learner and Lynnette came to this realization as a result of two failures in an attempt at the high school level. Neither student had experience as an online learner. Their schools had the means for teachers to create their own course web pages but they were primarily along the lines of Web 1.0 in that they were strictly read-only. Neither student had experience with interactivity in an online educational setting even though it seemed that they were online, Facebook, Twitter, etc. all the time. Trying to get them accustomed to using their Google Drive and submitting assignments electronically was out of their comfort zone, let alone attempting a ‘Google hangout’ with their teacher. Much of it may also have been due to the fact that Lynnette was working with each of them individually in a tutoring capacity so there was no group support or group encouragement and possibly was very intimidating for a teenager to participate alone in a synchronous session with a teacher. It is often the case that learners are familiar with technology but don’t really know how to use it. This brings the discussion right to the difference between a simple online environment and a personal learning environment. A basic example would be someone who knows that they are using Firefox to go online, but when asked what browser they are using or are told to close their browser, they have no idea that one is referring to Firefox.

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The PLE is very extensive for some and rather limited for others, either by choice or comfort level. So what does a PLE look like? It encompasses a multitude of tools. This first part is a partial list of components (Attwell); the second gives a few examples. Components Word Processor Weblog or Blog Web Browser Photo Editing Search Engine Photo Sharing Email Bookmarks and Bookmark Sharing Website Podcast Publishing Service for managing/sharing work Presentation Software Audio Instant Messaging Video Newsreader Examples Your computer: Is it MAC or PC, a desktop or a laptop? Your operating system: Is it iOS or Windows and which version? What word processor are you using and how do you access your email? Which search engine do you prefer to use? Do you use bookmarks? Do you share bookmarks? Photos: Do you store them on your computer, use a photo sharing service, and have a photo editing program? Messaging: Do you use a chat program or online meetings/web conferencing? File sharing: Do you take advantage of cloud storage in order to share and work on documents collaboratively? A PLE can include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, presentation software, personal websites, personal blogs, podcasts (listening, downloading, creating), music (Attwell)…the tools are extensive and the examples are meant to give the reader a general idea and are by no means comprehensive. It is more interesting to examine Ken’s PLE since it is quite extensive. Here are a few examples, but again, none of the areas is comprehensive. Ken uses three laptops, a Chromebook, a tablet, a smart phone, a laser printer, a scanner, a converter for printing from old photo negatives and slides to upload and make digital prints, and a digital camera. He uses Windows and the newest version of Microsoft Office. He prefers the Chrome browser, but also uses Firefox, but avoids Internet Explorer. He uses Snapfish, Tumblr, and Picasa for photos, all organized in online albums. He uses Google Chat, Google Hangouts, Skype, FaceTime, and WebEx. He uses Google Apps and Dropbox to collaborate on documents. He subscribes to iTunes and has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+. He has his own websites and his own blogs. He creates his own podcasts. He has thousands of bookmarks, but since the sharing of bookmarks has become less of a trend, he will post them when he is teaching online or blogging.

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Lynnette lurked in a French MOOC called ITyPA (mooc.fr) whose second season focused on personal learning environments. Stephen Downes gave the introductory video lecture in French. The administrators used YouTube in order to deliver presentations/lectures live from their homes for each module with a TweetChat (Twitter) for participant comments on the side. They delivered them at a predetermined time, so some people were nearing their dinner hour while others had just finished breakfast. They established an online presence. Lynnette could see their kitchens and offices and their bottles of Evian mineral water as they shifted from one speaker to another. If a participant had a time conflict, it was all archived so that participants could watch it at a later time minus personal tweets but still having access to the entire chat. Each module focused on a different component from the PLE list above. If a participant had never blogged before, they learned how to follow one as well as set up their own. The MOOC was designed to help people get comfortable with all these Internet tools. Those who lived in France set up hangouts at brick and mortar cafés and actually met with each other in person based on proximity. The idea was to promote being a life-long learner translated as tout au long de la vie. There was a ‘weekly wrap-up’ by one of the administrators which is an essential part of a good MOOC. Most importantly was the flexibility, another component of a good MOOC. Lynnette was able to move in and out and participate as she saw fit or when time allowed. This brings up the discussion of completion rates. This MOOC used badges earned for exceptional contributions as a form of recognition. Other than that there was no meritocracy and certainly no demerits for not participating in every little faction. Christine Vaufrey, one of the administrators in the ITyPA said it the best: “It’s not about why they leave; it’s about why they stay” (Gilliot), a topic which will be explored in a later section. It is important to recognize that there is no single learning provider, as compared to being in a lecture hall, that learning takes place in different contexts and situations and that informal learning plays an important role as well. Since good MOOCs should have open content, the learners become producers of learning materials through creating and sharing. The foundations of social software narrow the divide between consumers and producers of content. The two tables that follow take what we have discovered about successful online courses and those who participate in them, and add what we know and have experienced so far ourselves about the MOOC environment. The first table considers the characteristics of the learning environment of the F2F or traditional classroom compared to the virtual learning environment of the online classroom. The second table reflects characteristics of the personalities and learning styles of successful participants in the traditional classroom compared to those who are successful in an online environment.

Traditional Face-to-Face Learning Environment MOOC Teacher-centered xMOOC is more teacher centered; cMOOC is more learner-

centered More ‘passive’ learning Connectivism is the heart of the MOOC; network learning is meant

to be more interactive Instructors ‘deliver’ knowledge Instructors and participants ‘guide’ the learning Focus on comprehension of content; content is offered via textbook and supplemental materials; subject-oriented

Focus on construction of content; content is acquired through an informal learning network that consists of the people a participant interacts with and from whom knowledge is derived; participant has more control over personal learning environment

Class time or seat time Sessions; participants work at own pace and at non-traditional times

Individual or group work in the classroom or practical physical space

Virtual teams, groups, personal learning networks that contribute to professional development and knowledge

Technology may be used, but is not central to the role of being a learner

Technology must be used and helps students explore resources and construct their own personal learning environment

Various media may be used, but most delivery is by the spoken word, with some written support; more likely that a traditional classroom will be supplemented with a virtual component

Virtual learning environment based on the web is required technology and it is very unlikely that a MOOC will ever have a face-to-face component; technology may help instructors use multiple forms of media and reach a wider variety of learning styles

Fact-centered, although it is becoming more common to use problem-based assignments

cMOOCs are often problem or project-based and groups collaborate online

This table “Learning Environments” is a derivative of “The Nature of Online Learning” from Online Pedagogy by Sandra L. Miller, used under CC BY-NC-SA-3.0, used by Kenneth Ronkowitz.

Table 1 Learning Environments

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Characteristics of Successful Participants in Traditional Courses

Characteristics of Successful Participants in a MOOC

Likes instructional and social interactions of traditional classroom Enjoys communicating with others through discussion forums.

There is a power of community fostered by social learning. More likely to follow links, feeds, chats but not necessarily participate

Learns best by listening and speaking Writing and reading take the place of speaking and listening Fluent in the target language and therefore can be more spontaneous

Non-native language users often have stronger writing and reading skills because they can reflect on comments and check or verify meaning

Is able to commit the time for commuting, attending 3 hours of class per week and completing a final project

Virtual campus is global and students can move in and out of sessions in different time zones and work at non-traditional times. Wrap-ups by the instructors are critical

Has difficulty obtaining regular access to the internet and e-mail. Has convenient and reliable access to the Internet

More appropriate learning environment for dependent participants. who prefer more direction/structure provided by instructor

Participant is self-directed. Learning can be synchronous or asynchronous

Out-going, verbal, high achieving participants can dominate the class

Participants with a more passive learning style may feel a more comfortable presence

Likes individual and group activity with known participants Individuals, teams, groups, connectivism without ever having to meet the other participants

This table “Characteristics of Students” is a derivative of “The Nature of Online Students” by Sandra L. Miller from Online Pedagogy, used under CC BY-NC-SA-3.0, used by Kenneth Ronkowitz.

Table 2 Characteristics of Students

Do we have evidence that MOOCs are effective? Not all fear of MOOCs is self-protection. One criticism of these courses in these early years is that we do not know if they actually work. While there is a lot of anecdotal information, much of the attention to MOOCs in the past two years has been because people are impressed by the caliber of schools offering them and the numbers of students that they attract. The data from schools and providers is just starting to be analyzed. Coursera retains its position as the largest MOOC provider in 2013. It offers almost half of all MOOCs available (Shah, 2013). That share will certainly be reduced by increasing numbers from other major providers - edX, Udacity and Canvas – but also from startups outside the U.S. that launched in 2013. That group includes FutureLearn, Open2Study, iversity, and France Université Numérique. About seventy-five percent of current MOOCs are in English and that percentage will decrease as other providers gain a share of the market. The next most popular languages are Spanish and French. XuetangX (China) and the Arabic provider رواق (rwaq.org) are using the open-source edX platform to offer courses in their native languages. A European provider based in Germany, iversity, offers some courses in German. Miriada X, a consortium of universities in Spain and Latin America, offers courses in Spanish (Shah). What is the impact on the stakeholders? We created and facilitated a meta-MOOC entitled ‘Academia & the MOOC’ that was offered in spring 2013 using Instructure’s Canvas Network (Ronkowitz et al., 2013). Essentially, it was a MOOC about MOOCs. The design of that offering was based on stakeholder roles. Modules were created with background information for five roles: instructional designer, teacher, support staff, university administration and learner. Within each module, there were discussion topics on the issues that we found were being brought up in discussions on campuses about allowing students to use MOOCs as coursework, and about offering MOOCs as an institution or individual faculty member. We were specific about how we defined a MOOC as it pertained to this particular offering. It was clearly online and open both in enrollment and in allowing participants to take the content and use it in other ways. It was not massive as compared to other MOOCs of the time. We had just over 1,000 people who registered and we had planned to cap enrollment at 2,000, if necessary. It was not what we would define as a ‘course.’ We stated in the introduction that the C of MOOC might better be seen in this instance as a ‘conversation’ or ‘colloquium.’ There were no assessments, other than some demographic and evaluative surveys. There was no offer of a completion certificate or credit. In fact, we expected that some participants would only be interested in their own role and not use all the modules. That turned out to be true. We used the activity logs in Canvas as an assessment for our own purposes. About half of the active participants focused on one stakeholder role/module. The more active participants made up about ten percent of the total enrollment and were people who

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viewed content in all the modules. The most active participants were the half of ‘this group’ that also participated in the discussions in all the modules or about 5 percent. The traditional roles of instructional designer, teacher, support staff, administrator and learner all have altered roles in the MOOC format. Although we were focused on the applications in academia, the ‘instructor’ might be a university professor, non-academic expert or corporate trainer. The ‘learner’ could be a college student, employee or lifelong learner. Since all of those roles bring different goals and expectations to the learning experience, the MOOC needs to be designed either to address all of those goals and expectations, or marketed to a more defined audience based on the course content. MOOCs are raising questions that make some shareholders feel threatened. Many university faculty members see them as a threat to their existence and a way for the administration to eliminate teaching positions. On the other hand, in conversations with colleagues from several universities, it has had the opposite effect. Certain professors have been assigned or asked to create a MOOC for the university in order to keep up with the changing times or to turn their already existing online course into a MOOC. Some of it is on a trial basis. University administrators see MOOCs as a threat to the credit and degree system that produces the operating capital of the institution. Some students want credit and advancement for the work they do in these courses. We have been told that it is up to the students to advocate for themselves in this situation, the precedent being credits for unpaid and sometimes paid internships for credit. Many proponents of MOOCs say that they will not bring about the elimination of these roles or of the university, but a redefinition. What role would the teachers and institutions play if learners themselves developed and controlled their own online learning environment? MOOCs may actually empower their role in a way that allows them to lead from the back. MOOCs could redefine learning so that those who are offering the experience and those who are participating in it interact to produce the learning. During the Academia & the MOOC conversation, we did not separate the roles of designer and teacher. We did not see ourselves as teachers after the MOOC launched. Once opened to the participants, we became in some ways ‘students’ since the content of the course could be altered by any participant during the experience. We did arrange course events such as online chat sessions with MOOC pioneers Bryan Alexander (April, 30, 2013) and Stephen Downes (May 8, 2013). Both sessions have been archived: Alexander: (https://storify.com/annindk/acadmooc-tweetchat) Downes: (https://www.serendipity35.net/index.php?/archives/2809-Chatting-About-MOOCs-With Stephen-Downes.html). We participated in all the role-based modules and discussions. At the end, the consensus about our meta-MOOC was that it actually would be possible to offer a MOOC without someone in the traditional role of teacher. Labels such as ‘facilitator’ and ‘coach’ were brought into the conversation. In that role, a course facilitator could manage the community discussion and revise the content as needed. Someone would need to assess the work being done if participants were receiving documented credit in any form for their efforts. That assessment might be done by peers or by technology. Both of those methods have emerged as necessary considerations in courses with many thousands of participants. There might be less

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desire or need to offer courses within traditional semester calendars. Start dates could be on a rolling basis, by cohorts or self-paced. Without using MOOCs, some higher education institutions are already developing competency-based degrees that offer these options over traditional credit hours based on seat time. Teachers and students who have participated in online learning since its inception tend to agree that this style of learning requires personal commitment, self-management and maturity for success. As described earlier in the chapter, Lynnette’s personal experience with online learning at the secondary level had been largely unsuccessful. When students were afforded the opportunity to work in an online learning environment, the two students involved were not able to self-regulate their time and work habits. It has yet to be determined whether a larger focus group would yield more success at their level. Our experience teaching undergraduate and graduate students online has been better, yet similar. The maturity required is probably not a type gained merely by the passage of years, but through previous learning experiences. Flexibility and numbers seemed to be a factor when Ken taught the same course at two different institutions. At one institution, the course was completely F2F, meeting twice a week. As a result, the numbers were capped at 15. These students earned better grades because after evaluating their assignments, Ken had more time to allow them to make revisions in order to show mastery. All the students took advantage of the opportunity for revision. At the other institution, the course was ‘hybrid’, meeting once a week F2F and the rest of the time online. It is typical for online courses to have a higher cap on numbers so there were over 30 students. Therefore, Ken opted to leave out the revision process. Those students were all in their third or final year of their degree program and had acclimated to the online process, including the use of an LMS, unlike the high school students since many secondary schools still do not implement an LMS. In Lynnette’s experience, her undergraduate course was the last one in an online certificate program. All of the students were used to online learning, but some were already working on the job and were active in the field as trainers whereas the rest of the students had not left the academic environment yet and all the concepts were new or theoretical to them. Those students created their own study group or accidental community since proximity was not an issue, so they collaborated face to face on their projects. Learning needs to be seen as an ongoing process - tout au long de la vie (Gilliot) - and the individual has a role in organizing his own learning. How can an educator ‘teach’ thousands of students? Class size has been an ongoing battle in education. Depending on a person's generation, the rhetoric will center on the teacher’s or the learner's personal experience. Some college students can speak about lecture halls with classes in the hundreds paired with smaller recitation sessions run by teaching assistants or study groups that reviewed lecture material with no real contact with the professor. Distance learning and e-learning pushed this further in virtual classrooms that easily offered large classes, allowed for teaching assistants and made contact with the professor even less real. No one in education held these types of classes up as the ideal, but they did serve the needs of some students, some faculty and many institutions. With MOOCs promising even larger numbers, how can one ensure that they will not run the risk of being just another way to present good old-fashioned lectures? MOOCs raise all the same questions, but it is clear that there cannot be even virtual 1:1 contact between a professor and 50,000 students. However, the

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MOOC can respond quicker as the need for capacity increases compared to how long it would take universities to expand their brick and mortar campuses. How do we know the identity of the students and who is really doing the coursework? For every online graduate student whose professor wonders who is at the computer and typing, there is an elementary school teacher who wonders if a parent is doing the homework for his or her ten-year old. Academic and corporate institutions have implemented identity strategies, software to monitor users and check work submitted in a continuing effort to stay current with new technologies such as the smartphone. There are so many ‘red flags’ that can tip off instructors when they validate work and check identity, for example, checking the IP address of a student’s work and finding that it matches the computer used by a different student in the class. It alerts the instructor. It does not mean that the student was cheating. There could probably be an entire chapter devoted to this topic. Integrity is a valid concern when one considers the stakes connected to the learning such as grades, diplomas, certifications and advancement. As mentioned earlier in the history of distance learning, the school district that had given credit for the Lee Canter graduate video course had second thoughts once these issues were brought to light. In the case of private secondary schools and higher education, the loss of many thousands of dollars to be enrolled in these classes is at stake. What happens to these concerns in a pure MOOC that has no cost and carries no credit or advancement? How does the participant benefit by cheating? In an academic or corporate setting where advancement is based on competency and mastery of knowledge or skills, the results will be very different. The learner who takes a MOOC in order to gain mastery would be given an assessment outside of the course. Whether this is an objective examination or a more subjective performance-based assessment, that person will progress only if they show competency or mastery. In many instances, even though a course is given online, there are arrangements for students to sign up for an in-person exam and they must choose the most convenient location similar to the way in which candidates for the Bar examination for lawyers or Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) must arrange to sit for their written exam at an approved test site center. Any lack of integrity in the learning process will be evidenced in those results. What are the proponents and critics saying? Like all debates, for every opportunity that a MOOC offers, there is a counter in the threat it poses, especially in higher education. MOOCs can connect universities to the public at large and provide knowledge beyond the classroom. This can be perceived as good public relations or even as marketing. In a higher sense, one participant at the panel discussion MOOC Experience: faculty reflections (n.d.) which was held as a follow-up to the Online Pedagogy course, a Princeton University professor, Chiang Mung, who was also teaching a MOOC, said that he felt it was part of the University’s mission to help educate people beyond the campus as part of their public and social service. Universities can extend their educational mission and raise the level of

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education globally. However, there may be political ramifications. A global framework is not necessarily congruent with political cooperation, and there are nations that would not want this for their people. Unfortunately, there are countries where citizens are starving to learn, but their leaders would prefer to keep them uneducated. When Ken and Lynnette were participating in the MOOC on Online Pedagogy during the introductions phase, the number of participants whose jobs were using technology to reach and teach in developing countries was profound. The entry of MOOC education in these countries would truly be a revolution. There are countries that currently have national education programs and instructors are often bound by the national curriculum. MOOCs are helping instructors in these nations find a way to push an evolution in their programs or at least give them the opportunity to be part of something bigger, that otherwise would be unavailable. The greatest concern comes from higher education where there is the greatest threat to disrupting the status quo. While they offer opportunities for higher education, they also threaten the tuition, credit and degree programs that have been at the center of universities for centuries. As with all online learning, questions about pedagogy, credits and validation are being asked and are seen as exacerbated by the number of participants in a MOOC. The revolution is beginning as career managers are starting to make accommodations in order for their employees to advance. A computer science engineer who already holds a Bachelor of Science degree, and has successfully proven herself for a certain number of years with the corporation, may only be required to take five courses in order to earn a certificate that designates proficiency as a systems engineer rather than the requirement of an entire Master of Science degree. The U.S. Department of Education allows certification for teachers if they have already worked in their field and can pass a national exam (Praxis) along with a certain number of education classes. As this is accomplished across borders via MOOCs, then the revolution will be in full force. At the World Economic Forum Open Panel (2014), Daphne Koller, CEO of Coursera, Inc. said that “there is a large market of people who cannot afford or have no time to get a degree or to stay relevant. Up skilling through a MOOC is not a replacement or substitution. It is efficiency and economy of skills.” The biggest criticism of MOOCs seems to be focused on the high dropout rate and low completion rate. Critics need to remember that scalability is a factor when comparing completion rates too. In a F2F class of 25 students, an 80 percent completion rate is 20 students. In a MOOC of 1,000 students such as our Academia & the MOOC, we determined under the most rigorous definition of completion that 5 percent of those enrolled completed every single requirement. That is 50 students. 5 percent seems very low, yet we reached more than double the number of students in the F2F class. There is a need to re-evaluate how to measure the success of MOOC courses and define what completion means. As discussed earlier, there should be a focus on why they stay and not why they drop out. The popular media loves a sound bite like when Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said that colleges are ‘dinosaurs’ and that they "never actually do anything" (Coy, 2013. para.3). His acknowledgement that college produces a better adult, but that college recruits are not equipped to contribute in the workplace until after the corporate training program, may please the trainers. However, it disturbs universities as this supports a growing perception that a university degree may not be necessary or economically worthwhile for success in a career (Coy, 2013). Similarly, it was said that Bill Gates showed shallowness when he quipped that he had just taken a MOOC

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in oceanography (Freedman, 2013, para.5). Proponents of the MOOC said that it pointed to part of his success and genius being that he is a lifelong learner and appreciates access to college courses despite the fact that he does not hold a degree from a university. It will be necessary for corporations to tell universities what is relevant for the workforce and they will adapt. The Internet has already disrupted the music and media industries and they have adapted with downloads and online versions and subscriptions. It has taken much longer for the Internet to disrupt education, but the MOOC is being viewed as the source of that disruption. Readers may get the impression that universities are against MOOCs, but Daphne Koller said that the universities “have picked up on MOOCs because they want to stay relevant” (WEF). It is probably not entirely coincidental that the MOOC and the Great Recession are contemporaries. The Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA (September 17, 2011, in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district) and student protests around the world enlightened many people to the price of a university education and to the debt that burdens students who earn degrees but are not guaranteed a job so that they can pay back their loans. It is also a time when older unemployed workers, victims of the recession, are looking for ways to quickly enhance or learn new skills. Without the money for tuition, the MOOC appears to be an alternative route to acquiring new skills. President Barack Obama made funding available to two-year colleges in the USA in order to offer free courses that would lead to certification in fields like Electronic Health Records (EHR) that have a current demand for skilled employees. The plan both offered training for people who needed jobs, and it filled a gap in the workforce in a sector that was part of the President’s Affordable Care Act (2010). Several prestigious higher education institutions collaborated on course content and made it available to be used as certificated programs or for credit courses that could lead to an associate degree (ONC). They were offered primarily online. Although the enrollments were massive across the colleges, and costs were limited to institution fees in most cases (tuition was made free through a federal grant), they were less open since it was necessary to register in a two-year (community) college in order to participate and the materials were proprietary to the participating schools. We taught in one of these programs. The flexibility of the content being offered online should have been an advantage for participants who often had other obligations and needed to be able to work asynchronously. Nevertheless, some colleges, including the one for which we taught, had problems finding enough participants in order to maintain the program. The courses did not qualify as a MOOC in its pure definition, despite being online courses with massive numbers of participants across the country. Even with funding and full-time instructors, about half the participants did not finish the credits or take the qualifying exam for certification. Critics are quick to pounce on completion rates that are below those of traditional F2F or online courses. This EHR program had a clear goal of certification or a degree, but exit surveys showed that some registrants were simply trying to update skills in order to maintain or advance positions in jobs that they already had. Proponents are quick to respond to the critics that one problem is that we are measuring success using criteria that are inappropriate for these new courses. A number of universities presenting their courses as MOOCs use a core group of enrolled and tuition-paying students at the hosting school as well as additional global participants. The core

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students provide the tuition that pays for the faculty member, as in the past. Those students receive the same attention from the professor in their discussion group and with their work as in the past. The other outside, massive population benefits from the materials, readings, recorded lectures and assignments, but without the benefits of the personal attention of the professor.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF MOOCS? It is obvious that MOOCs are still evolving. They do not need to be implemented only as a pure MOOC. Just as there are technology-enhanced classes and blended learning, there can and should be MOOC-enhanced classes. Schools and corporations can benefit from what was once seen as the ultimate library of the Internet, which has since become more of a tool that brings a world classroom into the physical classroom, office or home. In addition to the PLE, adaptive learning will be a key component if the MOOC format is going to distinguish itself from online learning and lecture listening. Traditional classes have made great strides in individualized instruction and modifications for different learning styles. Students are identified through testing as having learning disabilities and are assigned an IAP (Individual Adaptive Plan). Each teacher must consult the outline for each child’s individualized program and adapt their lessons, assignments and quizzes to accommodate their learning problems. They must also keep in mind that for all students, they must provide auditory, written and visual plans. MOOCs have a greater capacity since they are electronic and with large databases, modifications and remediation can be generated more easily to the point where the next screen for one participant may look entirely different from other participants because of demonstrated competencies and mastery, review and needed remediation. In a panel discussion in which we participated (MOOC Experience: faculty reflections), this idea of using MOOCs for adaptive learning was a topic of high interest. One example is the essay assignment submitted online. As the instructor indicates the errors or areas of weakness in each essay or in sentence structure, the next assignment might not be the same for every student. Based on the student's personal errors and needs, each student would be given links to the textbook or other resources to review and do practice activities that would foster mastery in the topics where the student showed weaknesses. A student with a great command of the language or concept on that particular topic would do an activity that might be more advanced or progressive. Assignments would be ‘adapted’ to the level of the student's expertise. Lynnette was already doing this in her Advanced Placement French class without the benefit of technology. After evaluating an assignment, each student got different practice exercises in order to better understand the errors. This was incredibly time-consuming for an instructor. Electronic capability such as Microsoft Access (Microsoft Office) and creating her own database would have been a real benefit at the time. The platforms created by the MOOC providers can easily incorporate the technology for this to happen. It could in fact be very similar to the way the gaming industry creates levels and achievements in their video games. MOOCs can be used in preparation for a class, as a review, or to fill in gaps discovered before and during a course. This is true even if the course itself meets face-to-face. Students can be directed where to go online in order to advance or remediate. At the secondary level, summer assignments or the ‘common book’ chosen to be read by all incoming freshmen at some colleges

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can be monitored through a MOOC and help guide the success of the first week of the new school year or semester. If the MOOC is structured properly, the students can collaborate throughout the summer and begin to build community that can continue when they enter the physical classroom. Many secondary schools have expressed an interest in creating MOOCs for summer assignments, especially for AP classes. The MOOC also holds promise for professional development and as a way to share best practices. Ken is currently working with the N.J. Department of Education (NJDOE) through NJIT to help them provide online professional development concerning Common Core State Standards in order to support New Jersey public school teachers while they focus on implementing their goals. In some secondary schools, teachers are already required to host a web page for each class that they teach. Parents are encouraged to visit these pages since they can act as a filter and answer questions that the parents may have without having to contact the teacher and they can monitor their child's homework if they choose. Students and parents discovered that they often have access to the pages of other teachers in the school as well. These ‘unintentional’ resources can open a wider range of opportunities and a MOOC platform might actually encourage the use of ‘master’ courses with sub-groups based on individual class rosters for specific assignments and assessment. Having a master course would be considered a revolution in primary and secondary education. A master course is a way of promoting best practices. When there are multiple sections of a course due to enrollment, there are also several instructors who must follow the same curriculum, especially at the primary and secondary levels, but each delivers it in their own way. If those instructors made an online version of their best lessons, assignments or resources for the different topics that they all have to teach in the form of a MOOC, they could use each other as consultants and the students would benefit as well by having access to another or several points of view. This would be an unprecedented effort in connectivism and collaboration. A MOOC-like master course for a subject like first-year college writing could serve the best common resources to a hundred sections, and still allow individual instructors to customize their own sections. While this ‘common core’ has great appeal to administrators for assessment purposes, faculty often feel it limits their approach to the subject. This approach has been used more with what are sometimes called ‘gatekeeper’ courses. These are fundamental college- level pre-requisites that students must complete before enrolling in more advanced classes which are necessary for degree completion. Many universities give qualifying exams in order to determine at what level a first-year student should register. Since there is no core-curriculum or national standard, a top grade from secondary school does not mean that all the students have achieved the same level of mastery for the university level. These courses at the first level of college credit are often the greatest obstacle for students and a barrier to continuing in a program. With retention rates being an issue of growing concern in universities, it is ironic that the MOOC, considering the criticism for completion rates, is actually being considered as a new approach for greater success in these barrier courses. Many studies of MOOC demographics have shown that those who register might be best described as lifelong learners. Lifelong learning is not done on an academic path. It is ongoing, voluntary and self-motivated. In the short history of the MOOC, we have seen a redefining of

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terms such as ‘completion’ and ‘success’. A person who registers for a course with the intention of learning only a specific part of the content will never ‘complete’ the course. This being the case with many participants, the completion rates have been seen as a kind of failure for MOOCs. The participant who does not participate by being active in discussions and submitting assignments or taking tests might be viewed as a ‘lurker’ and adds to those non-completion numbers. As previously stated, though enrollment may be motivated by personal interests, it can also be done for professional reasons. Learning needs and styles have changed primarily because of technology. Learning has always been an ongoing process and one that more often took place outside of a classroom space. However, in the past fifty years, the recognition of this type of learning – including workplace learning and professional development and training – has formalized its use. Should we measure the success of a participant or a course based on our traditional academic definition of completion when the MOOC is offered and used without that definition in its composition? We have taken MOOCs as learners with the intention to gain information about some areas of study in the course, but without any intention to use all the content or to complete assignments. Did we fail the course? We took from the course exactly what we wanted and succeeded in our objectives. It is not wrong to look at the number of participants that ‘stay the course’ as one measure of success, but it may be wrong to measure a course’s lack of success by the number who drop out. It has become important to survey participants at registration about their expectations and objectives for the course. As MOOCs become more adaptive in their delivery by the providers, learners can be better set on a path to complete their own course of study. Some of the MOOC providers are working on the technology for incorporating adaptive learning. Many of the authors’ colleagues see adaptive learning as a direction for MOOCs. That is why there has been increased interest in the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) in online learning. A PLE allows learners to manage their own learning by setting their own learning goals, managing content, managing the process and their interaction with others in the process. Currently, these PLEs are informal and often take the form of using Web 2.0 technologies like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, etc. in the most integrated fashion available. There may be a platform created to enable the learner to gather all of these networks in one place – a kind of ‘My PLE’ – that would also allow them to be part of a network of learners on a similar path. Gartner, Inc. (Hype Cycle Research Methodology), an information technology research and advisory company, uses Hype Cycles as a way of describing how a technology evolves over time. Using their cycle methodology would show MOOCs as having moved past their ‘Technology Trigger’ cycle by 2011. Those early years were a time of experimentation and proof-of-concept examples without products or platforms or business models. The next two years brought about a shift as these courses were offered by for-profit and not-for-profit providers, such as Coursera and EdX, and more universities began to launch courses using these platforms or their own. In this Hype Cycle, 2012 and 2013 would be the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations.’ After all the coverage of success stories, popular press coverage of MOOCs swung to the inevitable tales of failures. Sometimes it was a single course, sometimes the whole program at a university and sometimes an entire provider. Udacity is an example of the latter, as the CEO Sebastian Thrun decided that MOOCs might be better suited to corporate training than college education. (Hype Cycle Research Methodology, 2014)

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FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS We suggest that the MOOC is currently in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ on the Hype Cycle (Gartner). This period, characterized by a lack of progress or activity, is when a technology retools. The weaker providers fall away and new configurations based on best practices are launched. In order to move out of this and climb the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’ (Hype Cycle), it will be necessary to highlight some MOOC examples that consistently benefit students and institutions. The next generation providers and platforms will need to appear and some new enterprise investments will need to exist. The MOOC, or whatever name describes it in the future, may take another five to ten years to reach a ‘Plateau of Productivity’ where there is wider adoption of a MOOC style of learning (Hype Cycle). We believe that great educators think alike and while the MOOC is evolving, it will revolutionize education when instructors across the globe collaborate to put the first good universal course online. We agree with Sebastian Thrun that MOOCs are challenges, not lectures, even though Thrun has decided that MOOCs may be better suited to training rather than academic education. He has also written that “with appropriate mentoring, our data suggest we can do up to 20 times better” (Thrun, 2013). He cited data from a pilot study that Udacity ran at the University of San José in 2013. A group of students who had received mentoring for their MOOCs had a pass rate of 71 percent, similar to the pass rates of face-to-face courses. For the rest of the groups, the attrition rate was as high as 96 percent (Thrun, 2013). We speculate that MOOCs are here to stay and that one reason why they are a threat is that they are viewed as courses instead of learning for the masses. The revolution will come when they are embraced as a real pedagogical innovation by people interested in actual education and not as a new business venture and that the support for MOOCs has a public or social purpose. Could it be a form of continuing education? We believe that MOOCs could be the solution to a problem that higher education needs to think about and the most difficult part will be overcoming the faculty members’ resistance to change. There needs to be a strategy for transforming the institutions as well as a strategy for surviving this disruption. It was suggested at Davos, (WEF) that apprenticeships through MOOCs along with higher education would ensure that graduates can enter the work force with the appropriate skills and MOOCs will create a need for “skilled pedagogists” (WEF). Both of these would be economic benefits. Since several providers have switched to a ‘for-profit’ business model whether they decided that the courses were more suited to training or that a nominal fee would raise the completion rate or pay for possible certificates, in the event that fees do become involved, we could envision a foundation which would accept donations to help people who cannot afford these fees. Lynnette has concerns with the platforms for providing the MOOCs. She believes that online learning is already better than lecture listening in lecture halls. The pedagogy alone provides for differences in learning styles. In order for them to completely nudge out lecture listening, there

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needs to be more interoperability and the providers need to include a component that allows for learning to be much more interactive. Some of them have a whiteboard where everyone can use a color or their cursor to contribute thoughts to an actual board or pad. There is a fatigue factor when the discussion board only allows for written posts. Everything needs to be read. There needs to be a component in order to illustrate. For Ken, it is giving up a lifetime of contact and control of smaller groups. He is so diligent that he tries to read every post which is not possible and the point of the posts is for the students to interact with each other and not with him. The miracle component for him would be a transcribing tool that would give him the highlights of the overall forums and discussions.

CONCLUSION Thomas Friedman captured attention globally with his book The World Is Flat (2005). Of course, there was no mention of MOOCs at that time, but his idea of the flattening world and leveling the playing field in terms of commerce certainly could apply to what MOOCs may accomplish in education. Friedman was concerned with the shift that will need to be made in order to stay competitive economically in a world market. He looks at countries, then companies, and finally, at individuals. The same shift can be seen in a flattened world of learning, only in reverse. Educators can view the personalized learning of individuals and move up in size to the university or company and, at some point in the future, its impact on nations. Generally, people are more comfortable accepting new concepts when analogies are made between something that is familiar and the new concept. That is why at the advent of the automobile, the industry used the term ‘horseless carriage’ and the Internet offered us a ‘virtual classroom’ (NJIT Online, 1970) and a ‘virtual university’ such as University of Phoenix (Arizona) and Thomas Edison University (New Jersey). Will it be part of the revolution or is it magical thinking that a MOOC University will exist someday? People see MOOCs as courses because they view them as an extension of the existing online classes. While MOOCs may have been seen as a way to extend the reach of institutions, they are evolving into a new way of teaching and validating learning. The revolution is the emphasis on the learning and not on the teaching yet some educators are fighting to keep the focus on themselves. We have already alluded to the revolution of education by using MOOCs in developing countries. On the flip side, we are not arguing the logic revolving around the limited number of seats available at the elite universities and mean no disrespect to them or their professors and students since all the institutions have quotas. But frankly speaking, if a candidate should decline their admission to one, then that university goes to a waiting list which means that there are quite a few more qualified candidates who did not secure one of the first spots. The revolution of the MOOC would open up spots for more candidates to take advantage of the value of an elite education across the globe. In fact, the MOOC could raise the level of competition too high for some institutions to survive. Why would a student want to take a course at a local university when they could take a MOOC offered by a renowned professor from another institution? Or suppose President Bill Clinton decided to teach a MOOC on foreign policy? Some universities may not survive while others may have to merge. Other monopolies have broken up and we maintain that it is unlikely that the one on quality education will continue.

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Nelson Mandela said that “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world” (Mandela, 2003). MOOCs will be a powerful way to change education.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course MIT OpenCourseWare. (2014, January 16). Wikipedia. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from

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ADDITIONAL READING Anderson, S. (2013, April 3). Designing and Implementing MOOCs that Maximize Student

Learning-Online Presentation with Amy Collier (Stanford) and Cassandra Volpe Horrii (Caltech). Online Spring Focus Session: Learning and the MOOC from http://cit.duke.edu/about/staff/anderson

Calloway, D. (2014, January 24). Millenials looking for a 'revolution'at Davos. USA TODAY. Retrieved January 24, 2014, from

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/ 2014/01/24/davos-millennials Clark, K. (2013, April 30). College is Free! (But Sometimes You'll Get What You Paid For.).

Time. Retrieved August 31, 2014, from http://time.com/money/2793973/college-is-free Freedman, J. (2013, November 25). MOOCs Are Usefully Middlebrow. The Chronicle of Higher

Education. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from http://chronicle.com/article/Moocs-Are-Usefully-Middlebrow

Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Higher Education in the Connected Age. (n.d.). EDUCAUSE Review Online | EDUCAUSE.edu. Retrieved August 31, 2014, from http://www.educause.edu/ero

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http://www.moocresearch.com Pappano, L. (2012, November 4). The Year of the MOOC. The New York Times. Retrieved

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Struck, P. (2013, April 3) Half an Hour. : Faculty Perspective: Teaching the Humanities to Humanity. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2013/04/faculty-perspective-teaching-humanities.html

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KEY TERMS AND DEFINITIONS MOOC: Massive Open Online Course Mac: Macintosh (Apple, Inc.) PC: Personal computer WEF: World Economic Forum, the Swiss non-profit foundation committed to improving the state of the world by meeting with business, political, academic and other leaders to shape global, regional and industry agendas. Davos, Switzerland: invitation-only meeting held at the end of January by the WEF in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland Bubble: an unreliable scheme or enterprise or an inflated speculation, especially if fraudulent Hybrid: a course that meets in the physical classroom and then continues the lesson online F2F: Face to face AP: Advanced Placement – in the United States, a college-level course taught in secondary school that can count for college credit based on an exit test score The ‘Net’: the internet Intellectual commons: removing the price barriers and permission barriers of copyright in order to share and use teaching materials Gopher: menu-document design considered to be the predecessor to the World Wide Web Listserv: early electronic mailing which allowed a sender to send one message to the list software which then sent it on to the addresses of the subscribers a private list LEF: Livingston Education Foundation, Livingston, NJ, USA Moodle: free software e-learning platform which stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment NJEdge: New Jersey Research & Education Network iTunes U: an application provided by Apple Inc. that allows anyone to view lectures and videos free of charge from institutions that participate ITyPa: Internet: Tout y est Pour Apprendre Lurker: online equivalent to a student who audits a face-to-face class Open(ness): a reference to "free,” as in no cost to participants, open enrollment, using open source tools and platforms and making content open for reuse by others. xMOOC: considered to be closer to traditional online courses; more teacher-centered; assessment via testing; tend to have the largest number of enrollees. cMOOC: the “c” from connectivist, as with early MOOCs; student-centered with an emphasis on networked learning; participants create a significant portion of the content and the direction of the learning Brand MOOC: when a company uses its influence to create a course that their clients and service providers can learn from and use. Content is not open source, but it does give people a chance to break into a field of knowledge. Meta-MOOC: a MOOC about MOOCs; because it includes an archive of course content and a massive bibliography of articles about MOOCs, it shows how many other ways content exists and offers pathways to use it Gatekeeper: courses required for all incoming first year university students in the USA Google Hangout: arranging to meet online synchronously