Alan Levine of CogDogBlog posted a wonderful explanation video of what a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is today.
I’ve been a student in several Open online courses, as well as been a professor in what Lisa Lane calls an Open-Closed course (The closed part dictated by the sponsoring university.) I’ve participated in the same course with Lisa. It was the course of Alec Couros, from whom I took one of the Open courses.
I’ve tried to create online communities with an earlier version of Clairvoy, which was modestly successful for a time. It was quickly eclipsed by organizations with vested interests and money.
So the MOOC seems to be the way to go if one is just a bunch of folks interested in the same subject.
Lisa outlins here what she calls “Open-Open MOOCS,” “Open-Closed MOOCS,” and “Closed-Closed MOOCS.”
According to Lisa, “Open-Open MOOCS” are like what others have called Online Professional Learning Communities.
Open-Closed MOOCS are what happens when a University has an online class and opens it to anyone to participate.
Closed-Closed MOOCS are what happens when forward thinkers in an organization have plans to do one of the first two models, but are shut down by their sponsoring organization and the networking component is lost.
We should consider creating Open-Closed MOOCS (Which are Open MOOCs with some structure) to promote professional collaboration. I’ve been trying Open-Open and it just doesn’t give enough structure.
Open-Closed MOOCS is one model which might work.