In this post, Paloma Recuero reflects on the origin of MOOC courses and the challenges that this training model faces in the corporate world.
To MOOC or not MOOC…
MOOCs have been one of the most recent and controversial educational innovations. After a boom in 2012, the year of MOOCs, we entered the well-known “Trough of Disillusionment” or “Gartner Curve Abyss of Disillusionment” .
We will recall that “Hype Cycles” are a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and commercial application of a specific technology according to a life cycle. They are used to analyze trends in technology and try to discriminate those that are really viable from those that, despite creating great expectations, lead nowhere.
MOOC Hype Cycles
Siemens itself predicted that if 2012 had been the year of cryptocurrency data MOOCs, 2013 would be the “anti-MOOC” year .
What is clear is that MOOCs represent a technological, pedagogical and educational innovation that has spread more rapidly than any other learning technology. At the same time, they have evolved and taken on different formats , some so varied that some purists consider them to be contrary to the very spirit of the MOOC.
What are the challenges that MOOCs have to overcome?
Since the birth in 2008 of the first connectivist MOOC ( cMOOC ), the well-known experiment by professors Siemens and Downes at the University of Manitoba , the great interest that this new format aroused brought with it a new modality, based on specific content and standardized evaluation tests ( xMOOCs ).
In 2012, the platforms Udemy, Udacity, Coursera, Mitx … emerged. All universities wanted to offer their MOOC, to be at the cutting edge of educational innovation. Soon they began to see the wolf's ears and to ask themselves questions:
Are MOOCs sustainable?
Should accreditations, badges etc. be issued? What is the validity of these accreditations?
What are the percentages of students completing courses? Is the course a failure if this percentage is very small?
How to verify that the student is who he or she says he or she is?
MOOC course challenges
It became clear that the way we learn was changing. Marina Gorbis from the Institute of the Future ( IFTF ) sums it up well:
«We are moving away from the learning model organised around stable and usually hierarchical institutions (schools, institutes, universities), which for better or worse, have been the routes of access to education and social mobility. «Replacing this model means adopting a new system in which learning is conceived as a flow, where learning resources are no longer scarce but abundant and accessible, where learning opportunities are many and learners acquire the ability to immerse themselves and emerge at will in continuous learning flows on a daily basis».