MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been part of higher education for a few years. Recently there has been an initiative to offer these cost-effective (and previously provided only in high education) at the high school level. The beauty of MOOCs is that they can be delivered to and accessed by those who previously were unserviced educationally. MOOCs are student-centered rather than teacher-centered; learners access information in which they are interested rather than information that is arbitrarily required.
As Palloff and Pratt discuss in Building Online Learning Communities, Ch. 9 "Transformative Learning," students who engages in online learning cannot remain complacent. They are no longer tethered to a geographically centered campus; students from all over the world will cause them to dig deeper into themselves and really learn the material. Learning is no longer institute-driven; rather, students will have to anticipate being questioned about their knowledge. Other students will provide feedback, not necessarily the instructor, which will cause students to reflect, revise and transform their learning and themselves.
The author of this blog, Verena Roberts, is an Innovation Lead with ADLC (Alberta [Canada] Distance Learning Centre) who is looking for online courses in order to create an open classroom for her children. She has done extensive research on this subject, and this article (which is really an essay or paper) presents her findings to those who are interested in learning about MOOCs.
In her presentation and evaluation, she also provides a model of her own MOOC and how it might be implemented at the high school level that she calls a Continuum of Open Learning, which includes a design model called the Open Classroom Model. She anticipates providing more information in subsequent blog entries.
References
Palloff, M. & Pratt, K.(2007) Building Online Learning Communities: Effective Strategies for the Virtual Classroom San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Roberts, V. (6 December 2012). Moocifying High School Learning Environments. [Web log post]. Creating an Open Classroom. Retrieved from http://www.openclassroomonline.com/121/
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