MOOCs
There has been much talk of MOOCs (Massive Open Online
Courses) over the past 2 years with the Open University arguably taking a lead
role in the UK seeing the launch of its platform FutureLearn https://www.futurelearn.com/. For those
that have not heard of MOOCs before they are courses, usually between 2 – 8
weeks long, offered for free and open to anyone, there is no entry requirement
beyond having an internet connection. The term MOOC was coined around 2008 from
the Open Education movement particularly those with an interest in OER, early
pioneers from Canada include George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The real
explosion of MOOCs in terms of significant uptake came about in 2011 when large
Universities such as Stanford released MOOCs to the world, in particular
Sebastian Thruns MOOC on Artificial Intelligence saw an enrolment of 160,000
students. Since then many Universities have released their own platforms
including the aforementioned FutureLearn from the Open University UK and edX
from Harvard and MIT, there are also very significant private companies such as
Coursera and Udacity founded by academics.
Development perspective
The uptake of MOOCs within the HE sector has increased
exponentially in the last 2 years with a belief that it will be of benefit to
the issues around provision of education in an ever expanding world (Trucano,
2013). With the majority of MOOCs coming from and being aimed at the global
north (ICDE, 2013) asking the question how do providers of MOOCs contextualise
them for a local or global context and how does OER support this
contextualisation? One answer was provided when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced
in his independence day speech the launch of an Indian MOOC platform 'Swayam' http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/moocs-platform-swayam-narendra-modi-deen-dayal-upadhyaya-iit-bombay-princeton-university-hrd-ministry/1/376764.html
Full details are yet to be released but there will be a launch on the 25th
September. This announcement has coincided with NCERT (National Council Of
Educational Research And Training) and COL (Commonwealth of Learning) launching
the ‘Teach Smarter with OER’ MOOC http://nroer.gov.in/CourseOnOER/
and a MOOC on MOOCs from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology)Kanpur http://mooconmooc.org/ which will have a
focus on development issues in particular low bandwidth access. IIT Kanpur have
already run one MOOC (http://m4d.colfinder.org/)
and have created their own platform MOOKIT http://mookit.co/
to support these it will interesting to see the crossover with the government
based platform.
TESS-India MOOC
The TESS-India project (www.TESS-India.edu.in)is developing a MOOC aimed at
supporting Teacher Educators in developing pedagogies based around
collaborative and open practices and the use of OER. Launching in May 2015 this MOOC will be
developed around the use of already existing OER with very minimal content
being originated in order to realise the potential of OER. OER used in the MOOC
will not always have specific local context as it is dependent on available
content, the contextualisation will come in the form of scaffolding and support
that the MOOC structure offers.
The MOOC will be developed collaboratively
with a series of developmental testing workshops and pilots within the focus
states to gain an understanding of the contextualisation required in the scaffolding. This approach will also support
the development of the course to work more efficiently for those with bandwidth
issues and seek to address alternative approaches that would be unique in MOOC
development.
References
ICDE. (2013) ‘World Bank EduTech: MOOCs and developing
countries’,
http://www.icde.org/en/icde_news/news_archive/2013/2013_part_2/World+Bank+EduTech%3A+MOOCs+and+developing+countries.b7C_wJLG2t.ips [online] last accessed 04/09/14
Trucano, T. (2013) ‘More about MOOCs and developing
countries’, World Bank blog on ICT in Education.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/moocs-developing-countries [online] last
accessed 04/09/14
