Promise and/or Peril: MOOCs and Open and Distance Education
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Abstract
The New Times declared 2012 to be the year of the MOOC (Pappano, 2012) and
certainly 2013 is becoming the year to talk about MOOCs! Questions related to the
design and inherent pedagogies, registration numbers, persistence rates, revenue models,
neo-liberal agenda, fears and aspirations of all of us in postsecondary education have
been ignited by this combination of technology and pedagogy. MOOCs are rapidly
becoming the type of disruptive technology described by Christensen (1997) as cheaper,
smaller, initially less fully featured and attracting a new set of consumers into an existing
market. // Much has been written and much more will by the time you are reading this article, from
when I write it in March 2013 - the MOOC terrain is under very rapid development. John
Daniel (2012) article, does a good job of defining and describing MOOCs and clearly
notes the different models and pedagogy (xMOOCs, cMOOCs) that differentiate
pedagogies, practices and profits involved in today’s MOOC offerings. In this article, I
attempt to update our map of the terrain and provide a lens through my 2003 Interaction
Equivalency Theorem (Anderson, 2003) to help us understand and explain this latest
development and/or fad in higher education. // I begin with a short description of the characteristic of the four words included in the
MOOC acronym and try to show how each contributes to the complexity of this
education phenomena.
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Pan-Commonwealth
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2013-03
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Commonwealth of Learning (COL)