Tag Archives: MOOC

Is completion necessary for MOOC participants?

I really am not sure that it matters that a lot of the participants in MOOCs do not officially “complete”. Yet a lot of the furore around MOOCs centres on the fact that only a small proportion of the students actually complete the course. I’d like to argue that it isn’t necessary for students to complete the MOOC to get something out of it.

Legitimate peripheral participation (lurking!) is a phenomenon that has been studied in traditional online courses and communities and is particularly relevant in MOOCs. Someone like myself may well join a MOOC and take from it what I need and have time to get, and be perfectly satisfied with the learning I have achieved, yet perhaps not have completed very many assessment activities or indeed any at all.

NOOCing Nottingham – my presentation from the ALT-C conference

Nottingham’s NOOC was an online course on Perspectives on Sustainability open to all staff and students at all three campuses of the University of Nottingham. Here’s the presentation from my talk about it at the Association for Learning Technology conference this week (sorry it’s a bit late!). Click into post for NOOCing Nottingham PDF

MOOC

MOOCs and all that

Online courses open to all seemed to be the flavour of 2012. Although during the last year they have popularly been referred to as MOOCs (Massively open online courses) some are closer to open educational resources or self study resources. The original MOOCs follow a Connectivist philosophy, while the 2012