I try to find the specific characteristics of MOOC which distinguishes it from other online platform i.e Moodle
Hola,
Los MOOC son cursos, esto es, pueden alojarse en diverso tipo de plataformas. Esto es, lo importante es el punto de vista pedagógico, su diseño pedagógico. Además depende del tipo del MOOC además de la plataforma que se aloje puede jugar con otras redes sociales propias o ajenas al curso. Creo que deben ir más allá del Moodle, que es una plataforma. No sé si me he explicado. Un saludo!
Jihane:
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are online courses that are offered to very large number of persons all over the world free of charge. These MOOCs can be offered using an online platform or learning management system like EdX, MiriadaX, Coursera. The distinction is that MOOC is an online course but the online platform is used to house the course in order to make it accessible to students. Here is an article that discusses the Emerging Patterns in MOOCs: Learners, Course Designs, and Directions:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-014-0821-y#page-2
Hope this helps.
DF.
HarvardX and MITx just released their report on EdX which makes for interesting reading.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2586847
Scale between an LMS and a MOOC would tend to be a large differentiator. An LMS is typically used by a single institution with a limited number of enrolments. A MOOC, on the other hand is used by many institutions and tend to have enrolments in the tens of thousands.
Purpose of MOOCs is, most often, to give prospective students a taste of what it means to study at a particular institution and therefore, to lead them to enrol in a full programme. Other purpose might be that somehow, this strategy is being considered towards world university ranking (I guess that is the reason why those 'top' universities are so much into this).
However, most MOOCs I have seen are poorly designed on-line courses. Most often, learning design is missing, and focus is on content delivery as video presentations and text resources. Most students enrolled loose interest very quickly, and retention rate is extremely small in general. There is a need for a model to inform more effective learning design of MOOCs, the model that gives recognition to activities as leads to knowledge changes.
Online platform is a technological tool for supporting and developing MOOCs, e.g. EdX, MiriadaX, Coursera.
This is an area of common confusion. An LMS like Moodle is used to create and deliver online instructional materials, frequently in higher education settings. Most often these courses would not be massive (i.e. with enrollments in the tens or hundreds of thousands) and most instances of Moodle would not be able to manage that number of students. The OpenEdX platform does something similar to Moodle in that it provides both the tools and can be hosted in an environment (e.g. AWS) that scales to manage very large numbers. The Coursera platform and edXxalso benefit from their elite and global reputation and partner colleges that attract millions of potential students to free courses in ways that is difficult for a single institution to do on its own. That aspect of the platform is sometimes forgotten, but in many cases it is what makes "massive" happen.
MOOC means simply that it is a massive open online course. Platform refers to the learning platform used to design and/or host the MOOC. Moodle is a software platform that requires desktop installation, and configuration of an external host.
What is becoming more common is integrated web-based platforms that users can design online and the website hosts your customized MOOC for free. After testing several platforms the two that I highly recommend are coursesites.com and eduongo.com. (See links below.) Both are free, intuitive, have robust interactive features, quizz/survey building tools, live webinar options, and multimedia options.
https://www.coursesites.com/webapps/Bb-sites-course-creation-BBLEARN/pages/index.html
https://eduongo.com/v2/
One distinction between DE and MOOCs, besides the technological aspects, is that DE usually concludes with a recognized academic qualification (like a degree) by the offering/hosting institution arising from the completion of a full academic program.
MOOCs, as of today do not. They can be part of a larger course (a fore-taste), or an independent module of a short course in an advanced topic.
Your question is actually a difficult one to answer, as MOOCs are evolving rapidly and their final form is far from clear at this time.
As noted my others, the acronym MOOC stands for Massively Open Online Course, and in its original form, consisted of a platform designed to host tens of thousands of students and a simple content delivery system that presented pre-recorded lectures to the students. The students could download homework and assignments from the online platform, but (again, originally) had little or no interaction among themselves. Since then, MOOCs have added interactive forums, and have added social-media-like tools to allow good postings to be upvoted, etc.
Some MOOCs have put a large amount of money into high-quality video and audio studios and facilities to produce high-quality content. A lot of the focus of MOOCs has been into delivery of the content.
Originally, MOOCs were open to any who wanted to try them at no cost to the student, but some MOOCs are now associated with specific courses, fees are paid, and officially certified course credit can be gained. (See (Lewin, 2013) for the latter.) Newman and Oh (2014) have a recent article about MOOCs that might be of interest.
Moodle is a free, open source software (FOSS) platform that works much like Blackboard. As noted by others, it's a learning management system, but has forums for student interaction as well.
However, I should note that these are not the only examples of online courses, and there is more than one way to go about them. Some professors have built online courses in virtual worlds like Second Life. For an example, see Lafsky (2009).
Some online platforms are built around a specific educational philosophy as is the case with Knowledge Forum (http://www.knowledgeforum.com/Kforum/products.htm), which is designed to work with Scardamalia's and Bereiter's Knowledge Building pedagogy (Scardamalia, 2002).
The world of online learning is much larger than just MOOCs and Moodle, although they get a lot of press.
References:
Lafsky, M. (2009, July 16). Can Training in Second Life Teach Doctors to Save Real Lives? Discover. http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-can-medical-students-learn-to-save-real-lives-in-second-life
Lewin, T. (2013). Master's degree is new frontier of study online, New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/education/masters-degree-is-new-frontier-of-study-online.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Newman, J., & Oh, S. (2014, 13 June). 8 things you should know about MOOCs. Retrieved 16 June, 2014, from http://chronicle.com/article/8-Things-You-Should-Know-About/146901/
Scardamalia, M. (2002). Collective Cognitive Responsibility for the Advancement of Knowledge [Electronic Edition]. In B. Smith (Ed.), Liberal education in a knowledge society (pp. 1-26). Chicago: Open Court.
MOOCs are strongly oriented to video, participation and collaboration. In MOOCs, teachers upload recorded videos telling concepts and lessons, and students can comment them and, of course, send relationed tasks to learn new concepts. They can see, meet and maybe talk via Skype with professor. However, in the typical and traditional e-learning platforms, professor uploads contents, response answers to messages from students but there is a knolwedge more "cold", less "personal". In both, as teacher you can provide to students other resources such as discussion forum, wiki reference, manuals and documentation, etc. I think this is a first approach to answer.
Online course which centers on content, MOOCs centers more on context. MOOCs require a set of skills beyond the ability to take courses online and attempt multiple-choice questions.
Regarding the content, we have different responses in this thread. Some see content focus for MOOCs, some for online platforms. Maybe it helps if we do not compare MOOC and online platforms, as in the original questions, but instead compare MOOC platforms such as coursera, edx vs. other online platforms such as Moodle, as well as compare MOOC course vs. a course on Moodle.
In addition to former responses:
MOOC platform is different from other online platforms in its very strong focus on video for content delivery and its strength on data (event-based logs, clickstream) and analytics.
MOOC courses are different from courses on e.g. Moodle in that the student population is generally much larger and diverse because Moodle courses are rather used in a closed institutional setting.
Maybe it also helps to ask what they have in common?
content delivery (but in rather different formats), collaboration tools available, often precise schedule, assessment tools, teacher-student communication tools
MOOCs are oriented to deliver content more simple and short manner than LMS as Moodle. Becuase MOOCs provide massive learning environments. For this reason the videos are the main format to deliver content in MOOCs. However, these platforms tend to be more similar along the time. Both intend to support several pedagogical approaches in the academic field.
MOOCS are free courses by academics, specifically designed not to be useful in any professional sense due to the desire to avoid competing with genuine (paid) courses that they may offer. The hope is that this will "advertise" themselves. Also a lecture is a poor way to teach; so a video of a lecture is an even worse way to teach. Distance (e-Learning) has the same key elements of good education. Namely, engaging background reading material, reinforcement and / or self assessment and finally examination / credentialing. An integrated machine level system will allow a revolution in education by virtue of "mechanising" education as machines did for the agricultural and industrial revolutions. What this means is that much of the teaching is self directed with machine feedback; based on and constructed by high quality educators who deploy systems that are consistent with the principles of good education. www.heartweb.com
I am sorry but it seems that there are some answers provided in this session do not get the right sense of MOOC.
MOOC is not just content presented online for free; it is a matter of actions, connections, and activities. Connections and activities of the learners themselves are what Connectivism is all about. Learning occurs while connecting nodes; "The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe; simply because the content changes rapidly" (Siemens, 2006, p. 32).
MOOC is an online course with two additional features: openness and massiveness. Openness is one of the core concepts of Connectivism. As Downes (2012) said, "The topic of 'openness' in education was sufficiently large as to require a separate work" (p. 11). In general sense, openness in Connectivism means a freedom of participation and engagement; a transparency of content and design; and a freedom of learners to teach and learn (Jacoby, 2014; Downes, 2012; Weller et al, 2012). Massiveness refers to the possibility to scale up the course in terms of the number of students (Weller et al, 2012). It can be seen that the massiveness is the result of presenting a course with no constraints in a networked environment. Consequently, it is normal to see a single MOOC with a number of students exceeding the entire number of students enrolled in some universities (Markoff, 2011).
Also please note that there are two completely different categories of MOOC: cMOOC and xMOOC. cMOOCs follow the connectivism theory while most of xMOOCs follow the behaviorism and cognitivism theories.
Please find our recent articles, they will certainly clarify something to you.
Article Planning To Design MOOC? Think First!
Maybe this could help you : http://www.inasp.info/uploads/filer_public/30/54/3054b6a8-a6eb-4ba2-98f6-027e2e3d7a7a/authoraid_mooc_lri.pdf
Based on their definition, its not much different between one another with MOOC aim to cater massive users in terms of their infrastructure capabilities and usage policy.
MOOC also tend to utilize more on video presentation instructional design, that were divided in to sub chapters/videos.
https://wansazlinasaruddin.com/review-online-learning/
https://wansazlinasaruddin.com/review-massive-open-online-course-mooc/
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