MOOCs Deconstructed: Variables that Affect MOOC Success Rates

How Massive,  How Open, To What Extend Online, to What Extend a Course?

Introduction 
This research study provides a brief history of a recent phenomenon in higher education called MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and examines the literacies, emerging frameworks, as well as developing market forces that promise to disrupt existing education models. The study also attempts to deconstruct some of the myths and mania that have evolved around MOOCs, acknowledge existing realities and challenges MOOCs present, and arrive at an evaluation of the pitfalls, potential, and possible future developments of MOOCs in the landscape of higher education. It does so by means of a literature review as well as a literature critique of a subset of articles focusing on Connectivist MOOCs. This study identifies two primary pedagogies and instructional design models in current MOOC courses, with the Connectivist approach on one end - and the Cognitive-Behaviorist approach on the other end of the spectrum.  The study concludes that current MOOC design models are challenged in providing a cohesive learning experience that can be scaled to massive audiences with divergent learner profiles and that they would benefit from a more social-constructivist approach to learning in which an online community is established and maintained. The study examines several questions the MOOC phenomenon has raised, but also identifies an  important question not yet being asked, namely who will ultimately benefit from the development of MOOCs and how will they serve our most vulnerable student populations?  
Scope of Search
The literature search was conducted using the University of Minnesota’s EBSCOhost repository selecting the Education Full Text, Academic Search Premiere, and ERIC databases.  Using MOOC as a single keyword search term, with peer-reviewed articles and full-PDF text as the search parameters, the query returned 16 articles: Education Full Text (7), Academic Search Premiere (4), and ERIC (5).  Searching Google Scholar with the single keyword MOOC returned 3,730 results within 0.05 seconds, from which two conference articles and one New York Times article were added to the review. Additionally, a high summary synthesis article conducted by the Education Advisory Board, a private research firm subscribed to by the University of Minnesota, blog posts by thought leaders George Siemens, Steven Downes, Curt Blonk, Phill Hill, Michael Feldstein, a two day virtual conference hosted by Educause on MOOCs, as well as education and mainstream articles on the subject all contributed to the examination of this topic. Personally, I enrolled in several Coursera and edX MOOC courses in order to directly experience and evaluate MOOC learning environments. I then coded the above articles into the following categories and frequency: General discussion of MOOC as a disruptive force in higher education (8), MOOC and constructivist theory (4), MOOC pedagogy (2), and MOOC as research for other topics (2). The literature review is initially organized chronologically to provide a brief history of the MOOC phenomenon from its origin as a part of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement into the phenomenon it has become over the past 24 months.  The remaining literature review examines the selected articles thematically since many of them address repeating and overlapping issues. 
Background 
Massive Open Online Courses, also knows as MOOCs, while seemingly a new phenomenon are rooted in the open educational resources (OER) movement which originated with the appearance of the first Open Content License in 1998, followed by Open Publication Licenses in 1999 with hundreds of creative commons licenses to follow. With Connexions, a Rice University affiliated nonprofit organization, in 1999 enabling authors to write textbooks that students can access for free, with MIT’s launching its OpenCourseware in 2001 and releasing 2,150 open courses to date, followed by Khan Academy’s open lessons in 2006, and  iTunes U’s open lectures in 2007, a growing expectation prompted elite institutions to partake in the creation and sharing of free educational content as a declaration of innovation and leadership. Open online courses, such as Social Media Open Education (2007-08) taught by Alec Couros and Introduction to Open Education by David Wiley present precursors of the first massive open online course. Similar to open online courses, a MOOC “integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in the field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources” (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens and Cormier, 2010), but on a massive scale. 
History 
2008
It is in this context that the first Massive Open Content Course (MOOC) was launched in Canada in 2008 by educational thought leaders, George Siemens and Steven Downes, to explore connectivist learning theory in action. Offered as a credit-bearing course to 24 students at the University of Manitoba, Canada, The Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Course (CCK08) was simultaneously made available as an open access Moodle network into which 2,200 registrants self-enrolled, of whom about 150 remained active participants.
2009-2010
The first MOOC research article emerged in 2009 examining the technological dimension of the CCK08 Connectivist MOOC (Fini, 2009), followed by two articles in 2010 authored by three CCK08 participants on the communication preferences and challenges of participants in self-directed forums and blogs and on the barriers to learning that exists in environments of high diversity, varying expertise, open structure, and limited support (Mackness, Mak, and Williams, 2010). The earliest literature reported both of the success of this bold experiment, but also raised questions about the feasibility of how communication and discourse in a massive course could successfully be implemented (Mackness, Mak, and Williams, 2010).
2011
The word Massive in MOOC became defined in the fall of 2011, when Stanford professor and Google executive, Sebastian Thrun, and Director of Research at Google, Peter Norvig announced that their collaboratively-taught Stanford course on Artificial Intelligence (CS221) would be opened to anyone in the world and 160,000 students from 195 countries enrolled. Drawing inspiration from Khan Academy style short video lectures, Thrun and Norvig delivered CS221 in instructional videos, hand drawn diagrams and outlines and assessed participants by means of  computer-graded quizzes, exercises, and exams, thus avoiding the demands of manual grading and feedback (EAB, 2012). Students of CS221 self-organized using social media platforms such as facebook, google+, reddit, etc. for peer-to-peer instruction and academic support, and even designed a software tool to support the course including an AI playground for testing code. Volunteers translated video dialogue and course materials into 44 languages and in the end, 28,000 out of 160,000 participants completed the course and received a Certificate of Completion from the instructors. The top 1,000 student resumes were requested via LinkedIn and passed onto to potential employers, 248 students - none of them from Stanford - received perfect scores, and the top 5 participants received job offers from Google (Education Advisory Board, 2012). Upon the conclusion of his Artificial Intelligence MOOC, Sebastian Thrun left his tenured post at Stanford to launch Udacity, an independent for-profit MOOC provider focused on STEM disciplines. As of April 2013, Udacity offers 22 courses predominantly in computer science but also several in math, physics and business varying from beginners to advanced difficulty. The model for Udacity courses is to derive profit not from delivering content but from auxiliary services. Udacity recently partnered with Pearson who is able to provide students with the opportunity for a proctored exam at one of their 4,500 testing facilities worldwide for a small fee in exchange for a Udacity authenticated credential for passing the course (EAB, 2012). 
2012
When in January 2012, two additional Stanford professors, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng,  ventured out on their own to launch a second for-profit start up called Coursera to partner with elite universities to produce their own MOOCs, MOOC mania was born.  Articles flooded the mainstream press declaring  2012, The Year of the MOOC (The New York Times, 2012), and headlines claimed that Free Online Classes Put Colleges to the Test (Star Tribune, 2012). Academic journals abounded with titles such as Will MOOCS Change How We Teach?, Will MOOCs Destroy Academia,  In the Year of Disruptive Education (Communication of the ACM, 2012). In these articles, the MOOC media hype speculated “that free courses can bring the best education in the world to the most remote corners of the planet, help people in their careers, and expand intellectual and personal networks” (Pappano, 2012). While it is true that the expansion of MOOCs continued at an explosive rate, with Coursera to date offering 370 courses by 69 participating universities for 3,490,036 participants, a number that increases by the second as indicated on Coursera’s website counter. If you would like to witness the climbing numbers of “Courserians” yourself, visit Coursera’s website at https://www.coursera.org/. 3
MOOC providers
While MOOCs have indeed become a phenomenon, it is time to reflect on their true potential to disrupt, transform, and expand educational access. To do this, it is important to first understand who the providers, players, and participants in the MOOC landscape are. The MOOC provider landscape, for example, is rapidly expanding and developing into a race of arms between proprietary platforms and the open-source movement, two divergent economic models. A part of this landscape are the two original for profit venture-capital start-up companies, Udacity and Coursera, launched by former Stanford professors that currently host MOOCs for elite universities and other early adopters of massive open online courses. Next, there is edX, the third original MOOC provider founded in partnership between Harvard and MIT, who remain dedicated to the idea that MOOCs remain an open educational resource (OER), and in that spirit announced the upcoming release of the source code for its entire online learning platform for anyone to use, thus polarizing the MOOC providers between the for-profit start-up providers and the open educational resources providers. “In support of that move toward open educational resources, Stanford will integrate features of its existing Class2Go open source online learning platform into the edX platform, use the integration as a platform for online coursework for on-campus and distance learners, and work collaboratively with edX and other institutions to further develop the open source platform” (Stanford News, 2013). 

Also on the provider horizon for hosting a MOOC is the recent trend for universities to simply use their campus learning management system (LMS):  Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle or Sakai, as was the choice of several of the Gates Foundation grant recipients: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (Desire2Learn), Michigan State University (Desire2Learn), and Cuyahoga Community College (Blackboard). Learning management systems, of course, also align across the spectrum ranging from the proprietary platforms (Blackboard and D2L) to the open source platforms (Moodle and Sakai). 
Finally, Google entered the MOOC landscape by providing $50,000 of funding for exploring the option of using CourseBuilder, Google’s open access LMS, as the delivery platform for a Massive open online course (Indiana University News Room, 4/11/2013). Above and beyond what has already been mentioned, 58 additional independent initiatives are currently hosting MOOC courses by alternative providers such as Class2Go, NPTEL, MIT Media Lab, MR University, Open Learning, Udemy, 10Gen, Open HPI, UWA Class2Go, Open2Study, and Michigan University (Class Central 4/22/2013). This wide selection of open content, open courses, and open hosting possibilities indeed seems to permit anyone to design and develop their own open online course provided they possess the expertise in instructional design, LMS hosting, and server management. The problem, of course, with smaller institutions or even individuals hosting their own open courses, is that there is no guarantee that any given open online course will attract the attention and consequently the massive enrollment as has been the case with MOOCs hosted by elite institutions taught by prestigious professors. Last but not least, publishing companies such as Pearson, McGrawHill, etc. are joining the MOOC provider landscape by providing auxiliary services such as testing and proctored exams. To help track the explosive list of courses across the developing provider landscape, Class Central aggregates these free online courses and initiatives for easy access and overview for interested parties at http://www.class-central.com/. 
Table 1 MOOC Initiatives
MOOC Provider	# of course offerings as of 4//20/2013	
Coursera	370	
Udacity	25	
edX	25	
Venture Lab	9	
Canvas.net	37	
Others	58	
Source: Class Central http://www.class-central.com/

MOOC participants and completion rates
In addition to understanding the provider landscape, it is important to consider who the participants are that currently enroll in these massive open online courses. While course content of a MOOC (which to date predominantly concentrates on science, technology, engineering, and math) is one criteria by which participants self-select into open learning environments; curiosity, exploration, and research prompt others to participate. Literature has thus far classified MOOC participants into the following categories: active participants, passive participants, drop-ins, and lurkers (Hill, e-Literate, 3/2/2013)
Active Participants are students who fully intend to participate in the MOOC, including consuming content, taking quizzes and exams, taking part in activities such as writing assignments and peer grading, and actively participate in discussions via discussion forums, blogs, twitter, Google+, or other forms of social media.

Passive Participants are students who view a course as content to consume and expect to be taught. These students typically watch videos, perhaps take quizzes, but tend to not participate in activities or class discussions.

Drop-Ins are students who become partially or fully active participants for a select topic within the course, but do not attempt to complete the entire course. Some of these students are focused participants who use MOOCs informally to find content that help them meet course goals elsewhere.

Lurkers are the majority of MOOC participants, where people enroll but just observe or sample a few items at the most. Many of these students do not even get beyond registering for the MOOC or maybe watching part of a video.

To be fair when comparing enrollment against completion rates, Framer (2013) in a recent e-Literate article recommends “capturing the spectrum of purposes for student participation and only measuring those against completion who actually intended to complete the course to begin with” (Framer, e-Literate 3/12/2013). Framer further elaborates that universities’ current measures of completion and retention rates would need to be re-evaluated when analyzing MOOC courses. He cites University of Utrecht Professor, Paul Kirchner’s business model as a possible model for calculating MOOC enrollment and completion rates and to delineate open access from tuition-paying models.
Table 2 Kirschner’s Business Model
Phil Hill’s Student Patterns	Purpose	Kirschner’s Business Model	
Active Participants	Degree or Credential Seeking or Career Development	Full tuition	
Passive Participants	Career or Personal Development	Tutor assistance only	
Drop-ins	Personal Development	By choice at registration, either full tuition or tutor assistance	
Observers	Browsers	Open access to course materials	
No-Shows	Browsers	Open access to course materials	
Source: (Hill, e-Literate 2/26/2013)
To get a better idea of how a massive course enrollment holds up to the number of students completing a MOOC course, it is helpful to examine a recently compiled data set published by Katy Jordan, a graduate student at The Open University of the UK. Jordan clarifies, that while “enrollment in a MOOC has reached up as high as ~180,000 participants, 50,000 is a more typical enrollment number” (Jordan, 2013),  with many MOOCs only reaching hundreds or several thousand participants. Completion rates measured against these massive enrollment numbers also vary. According to Jordan, completion rates as measured in active participants completing the course requirements “can approach 20%, although most MOOCs have completion rates of less than 10%” (Jordan, 2013). Jordan’s interactive data set provides the most thorough summary of MOOC completion rates to date and allows one to filter completion data by completion criteria, by platform, by university, and by assessment type (e-Literate, 2013). To explore the data set first hand, please visit Katy Jordan’s MOOC Completion rates at http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html. 
MOOC myths and mania

Riding the tsunami of tuition-free courses offerings are speculations that “MOOCs Will Destroy Academia” (Vardi, 2012), and that MOOCs will “finally pop the tuition bubble” (The Chronicle, 12/17/2012), pronouncing that “College is Dead. Long Live College!” (Time, 2012). The excitement around MOOCs was twofold: the possibility or promise that they will provide “free access to top education resources to everyone” (Hyman, 2012) and that they have the possibility to lower the cost of higher education while at the same time creating a new way to expand the market of education beyond the traditional campus model. “The great opportunity here is that we’re going to be able to provide everyone - no matter where they are, whether they have money or not - the ability to be able to learn and advance themselves in their lives and their careers” (Hyman, 2012). Hyman further speculates that “those who may benefit the most from MOOCs are the people in the developing world who previously had no access to consistent, quality, secondary education at low cost” (Hyman, 2012). Pence (2012) confirms that “across all Coursera courses offered thus far, 74% of registrants live outside of the United States”. The TIME magazine story of eleven-year-old Khadijah Niazi in Lahore, Pakistan who was on question six of her final exam in the Udacity Physics course when the Pakistani government shut down access to YouTube, and with it access to the videos required to complete the exam, made international news and seemed to validate the myth that MOOCs will surely solve the educational needs that exist in so many parts of the world (TIME, 2012).The international support Niazi received from within the MOOC learning community who learned about her trouble from the course discussion post and came to her rescue by providing the course materials on a non-sensored website, resulting in Niazi successfully completing her final exam and earning not only the highest distinction, but also making her the youngest girl ever to complete Udacity’s Physics 100 class, a challenging course for the average college freshman, had all the makings of a fairy tale; a story of hope and promise. Under closer examination, however, Niazi’s success story does not easily transfer to other learners, especially our most vulnerable students. 
Realities  / challenges
By definition massive, online, and open, the MOOC learning environment presents unique challenges in course design, delivery, and pedagogy. Some of the immediate criticism of MOOCs have centered around the lack of pedagogy and best practices in online course design, the confusion caused by too much openness: choices of tools and modes of interaction, the complexity of facilitating meaningful interaction in an open environment in which thousands of students with diverse abilities, interests, and cultural backgrounds participate, and the withdrawal of learners resulting from a lack of support.  Other challenges MOOCs present are how to avoid cheating when students complete remote examinations, and how to effectively measure learning for thousands of students other than in computer-graded tests. The million dollar question is how to design MOOC courses to deliver meaningful learning experiences at a massive scale, and of course, how to make this freely available educational resource sustainable for institutions that offer them and accessible and meaningful to those that need them the most. 
MOOC design
When discussing MOOCs, it is important to understand that current MOOC course design facilitates two philosophically divergent online pedagogies: a small cluster of courses explore a connectivist pedagogy which hold central the principles of openness, networked communications, and distributed knowledge, and the larger share of courses which follow a cognitive-behaviorist pedagogy of structured, content-driven, outcomes-based lessons. More recently, courses are expanding their subject matter into the social sciences and toward a blend of the two pedagogies. However, little research exists on these courses as of yet. The pedagogy of a MOOC becomes apparent as it does in other online or blended learning environments, through the selection and design of its course platform and/or network of tools by which learners interact with the course content, communicate and collaborate with one another, create and share their own knowledge, and aggregate and measure learning. A MOOC learning environment can consist of a single environment, a learning management system perhaps, or of a selection of tools that together create a dynamic and expansive learning network. To date MOOCs have been designed either with a maximum of openness for participants to make decisions about content, tools, and participation - the Connectivist MOOC or as a more structured and systematic learning experience with defined expectations, timelines, and deliverables - the Cognitive-Behavior MOOC. Neither have proven to be a learning mode for the average undergraduate college student; but new models are emerging.
Connectivist Course Design
On one end of the MOOC spectrum is the connectivist MOOC (c-MOOC) which holds at its premise “the explicit principles of connectivism: autonomy, connectedness, diversity, and openness and the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing, and feeding forward of resources and learning (Rodrigues, 2012). The c-MOOC, thus can be viewed as sort of a “digital practice of skills” (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens & Cormier, 2010) required to succeed in a digital economy, in which “capital lies on the capacity to leverage, connect, and promote knowledge (Lesser, 2000). Thus, “the successful participation in a c-MOOC parallels and scaffolds successful participation in the larger digital economy” (McAuley, et al, 2010). The instructional design of the connectivist MOOCs therefore consisted of multiple digital spaces with choices of tools for the learner to use built into the design of the course. Openness, as defined in a connectivist MOOC is based on the social interactivity and generativity of the learners in an environment that facilitates rather than structures the learning path. It is also “openness to the personalization of learning, to dialogue, debate, and conversation; to novel, divergent, and creative thinking; to the participation based on connection, collaboration, and sharing” (Rodrigues, 2009). 

Noteworthy is the fact that subjects explored in c-MOOCs aligned themselves well to the connectivist approach;  see Table 3 of c-MOOC courses and content alignment.

Table 3  c-MOOC Courses and Content Alignment
Date	Title	Course Content	
2008	CCK08	Connectivism and Connective Knowledge	
2010	PLENK2010	Personal Learning Environments and Networks and Knowledge	
2011	EduMOOC	Online Learning for Today and Tomorrow	
2011	MobiMOOC	Mobile Learning  	
2011-12	Change11	Education, Learning, and Technology	
2011-12	DS106	Digital Storytelling	
2012	LAK12	Learning Analytics	
Source: Rodriguez, 2012
According to George Siemens, co-author, designer, and instructor of CCK08, the connectivist MOOC centered around, “high levels of learner control over modes and places of interaction, learner autonomy in selecting learner resources and level of participation in activities, an emphasis on social systems as effective means for learners to self-organize and wayfind through complex subject areas, and of learners creating and sharing their understanding of the course through a variety of media” (Siemens, 2010). The skills required to navigate multiple digital environments, to aggregate and disseminate vasts amounts of information, to successfully connect with others through a variety of digital means, and to create and share your knowledge using digital platforms are central literacies of our digital economy but also require a high level of digital literacy. Digital natives will be more or less able to navigate these dimensions, whereas digital immigrants of any sort will be vastly challenged in this mode of learning. Additionally, the lack of structure, the volume of participants, the activities distributed across many digital spaces resulted in creating confusion, frustration, and lack of coherence.  
Inherent challenges in the connectivist course design according to Siemens, are “finding a way to connect the fragmented pieces in such a way as to provide learners with a sense of knowledge coherence” (Siemens, 2010). 

Illustrative of the connectivist pedagogical model is a case study of MobiMOOC 
(deWaard, I., Abajian, S., Gallagher, M. S., Hogue, R., Keskin, N., Koutropoulos, A., & Rodriguez, O. C. (2011), a six-week open online course exploring the similarities of mobile learning (mLearning) and the MOOC format in which 556 MobiMOOC participants explored the topic through weekly sessions guided by mobile learning experts who remained active through the length of the course. MobiMOOC was an examination of a learning community as a self-organizing fluid network around a shared topic of interest engaged in dialogue through a variety of social media tools and mobile technologies. The authors concluded that mobile technologies and MOOCs both share affordances that contribute to the emergence of a new framework for education in which learning is untethered from the traditional constructs of place and time and from the linear delivery of today’s education model and is developing into a framework that is based on the concepts of openness, self-organization, networked communication, and distributed knowledge more befitting the knowledge society which we live in today. The authors acknowledge the complexity and chaos that arise out of these self-organizing, complex ways of producing and disseminating knowledge, yet agree with the connectivists that the “filtering of this complexity” (de Waard et al, 2011) is a literacy we will be required to have in the Knowledge Age in which information is exponentially increasing, communication is facilitated via social media networks, and information accessible from devices anywhere and anytime. Additionally, learning in a completely self-directed learning environment assumes that learners possess self-directedness, motivation, critical literacy, and problem-solving skills which many students lack or still need to develop. 
Cognitive-Behaviorist Course Design
On the other end of the MOOC spectrum is the cognitive-behaviorist course design more resembling traditional instruction scaled to a massive audience. These make up the majority of current MOOC courses offered by MITx, Coursera, and Udacity which deliver instruction via a combination of chunked video lectures (talking head videos,  Voice-over-PowerPoints, and combinations thereof), scaffolded by learning objects (demonstrations of processes, formulas, experiments), online exercises, and automated checks for understanding. Communication in these courses is guided by way of voting up popular questions on the discussion board, a sort of crowd-sourced student support, to which instructors respond and record their answers in regular intervals. Structure and routine are explicit and help regulate expectations and interactions among learners. Learner support is self-organized by participants via the discussion board and facilitated in third-party tools. The community of learners is free to engage in any way that they please, but the affordances of the platform do not facilitate social media type interaction; these would have to be sought in third party tools. Instruction in these courses focus on clear outcomes, measurable deliverables, and predetermined achievement standards. An example of such a course is MITx’s Online Circuit and Analysis Course, dubbed 6.002x, taught by professor of electrical engineering, Avant Agrawal, who managed to “create an impressive suite of shared resources, including an online version of the 10,000 page course textbook co-authored by him, an always-available ‘circuit sandbox’ lab environment complete with virtual signal probes, sweep generators, and oscilloscopes” (Spectrum, September 2012). The course also followed traditional practices such as homework assignments, midterm and final exams as well as supplemental tutorials and math refreshers to remediate instruction. One hundred fifty thousand participants enrolled in the course of which “5,800 passed the final exam, and 7,157 earned enough credit overall to pass receive a certificate of completion” (Spectrum, 2012).  The subjects of many of the truly massive online courses fall in the domains of technology, math, and the sciences and it is these massive courses that are the focus of much of the discussion and hype. Broad questions whether MOOCs will dismantle traditional instruction, replace the campus college experience, and disrupt higher education at large are raised as well specifically whether elite universities will offer transferable credit or full credentials for MOOCs, whether working adults will see MOOCs as an alternative to professional education courses, or whether employers will accept MOOC certificates as evidence of relevant skills, are a few of the questions everyone is seeking to answer.
MOOCs have also prompted much discussion about online cheating, the need for proctoring and testing services, the development of identification technology, and about accreditation and acceptance of transfer credits for achievements in these self-directed learning environment. In response to these needs, the education provider market is responding with offers of to provide or develop these services.  Below, a sampling of courses with content delivered in the cognitive-behaviorist pedagogy. 
Table 4  AI-type - MOOC Courses and Content Alignment
Date	Title	Course Content	# Enrolled	
2011	CS221	Introduction to Artificial Intelligence	160,000	
2011	6.002x 	Online Circuit and Analysis  	150,000	
2012	N/A	Functional Programming Principles in Scala	  50,000	
2012	N/A	Software Engineering for SaaS	  50,000	
2012	N/A	Introduction to Genetics and Evolution	  33,000	
2013	N/A	Introduction to Databases	  64,000	
2013	3.091x	Introduction to Solid State Chemistry	  28,500	
Source: http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
Noteworthy, despite these significant numbers, is the fact that the audiences for most of these subjects are already educated professionals or that the topics of these courses require a foundation of education in math, the sciences and or technology. When examining statistics gathered about the audiences of the above courses, several had a mean education level of a Master’s degree (Jordan, 2013)
Other MOOCs
More recently MOOCs have been branching out into the social sciences and in their course design fallen somewhat in between the open / distributed / networked Connectivist MOOC and the structured / outcome based / accreditation seeking Cognitive-behaviorist MOOC.  Topics range from the arts to education to health and society and most recently to teacher professional development; a choice of several hundred topics to date, in five languages, and with the option to gain certification for completed work through a signature tracking software for selected courses for a small fee. Course materials are delivered through video lectures, assigned readings, and other open educational resources (OERs), but participants are also invited to work in teams to problem solve, design, discuss, or create projects. Self-assessment, peer-assessment and rubrics assist the grading process and individual or small group projects are “published “ back to the large group to share with the entire class. The introductory video of Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Introduction has excerpts of teachers from Ghana to Malaysia offering their perspectives on teaching. Even the University of Minnesota signed with Coursera this spring of 2013 and is in the process of launching five MOOCs on the topics of chemistry, healthcare informatics, canine theriogenology for dog enthusiasts, social epidemiology, sustainability of food systems, and statistical thermodynamics. 

Table 5  Upcoming Social-Sciences Courses by Coursera
Date	Title	
April 2013	Immigration and U.S. Citizenship 	
April 2013	Introduction to Improvisation 	
April 2013	Introduction to Guitar 	
October 2013	Surviving Your Rookie Year of Teaching: 3 Key Ideas & High Leverage Techniques 	
January 2014	Coaching Teachers: Promoting Changes that Stick 	
January 2014	Foundations of Teaching for Learning 1: Introduction 	
February 2014	Foundations of Teaching for Learning 2: Being a Teacher 	
April 2014	Foundations of Teaching for Learning 3: Learners and Learning 	
Source: https://www.coursera.org/courses
Remedial MOOCs

One particular noteworthy development in the summer of 2012 was a Request for Proposals by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to explore the potential of “introductory and remedial level MOOCs” (Gates Foundation, 2012) as basic college and pre-college courses to average or under-privileged students. On November 13th, 2012, the foundation awarded $550,000 to nine universities and community colleges to develop 11 MOOCs (Gates Foundation, 2012) that would explore “ whether MOOCs can meet quality design standards, and incorporate proven methods of effective online instruction, and be effective for different learners” (Quality Matters, 2013). These MOOCs are currently in production or in the process of being offered on topics ranging from Developmental Math and Writing to English Composition. Feedback from the provost of one of these remedial MOOCs at the Educause Spring 2013 conference reported that in order to make the classes work, class size was limited to 100 students per section, TA’s were enrolled to support students, and tutoring and other “wrap-around  services” were provided online and locally to help participants succeed. In other words, all aspects of the MOOC, the massive, the open, and the online were managed in order for students to learn. In many ways the MOOC itself was treated like a textbook and instruction was delivered in a blended model with on-campus students receiving support and interfacing with a larger online community of classmates. 

The Need for a Social-constructivist Approach
Online learning communities that are successful are centered around a social-constructivist approach in which the members of the online learning community ”feel connected to and assist each other in their efforts to learn” (Rovai, 2007).  This approach is grounded in social learning theory (Vygotsky, 2006) which asserts that learning occurs within a social context that involves personal experiences, observations, and interactions with other individuals. It reminds of  the important goal of distance education to create a learning community “in which members feel connected to and assist each other in their efforts to learn” (Rovai, 2007). Constructivism is a philosophy of learning based on the premise that “individuals construct their own understandings through experience, maturation, and interaction with the environment, especially active interaction with  other learners and the instructor” (Rovai, 2007). A social-constructivist MOOC design would therefore have to carefully tend to the development of the online community and to the facilitation of online communications to assure meaningful social interactions that support the learning goals. The connectivist MOOC provides a selection of social media tools for communication and collaboration to occur but falls short in designing an and nurturing the communications that allow learners to feel connected and engage in meaningful interactions. Furthermore, the Connectivist MOOC requires that participants navigate multiple digital spaces for communication which has the effect of decentralizing the community into incoherence. The Cognitive-behaviorist MOOC emphasizes content delivery in a predominantly  individualized learning mode with automated assessments and only minimally requires or facilitates social interaction. Even the learning management platform of most cognitive-behaviorist MOOCs lack the affordances for participants to establish their identity, self-organize into groups, and for instructors to manage social interactions in a meaningful way for its thousands of participants.  According to Rovai (2007) effective strategies in the design and facilitation of online communication would require the following criteria:
Design
○	Generate motivation for students to engage in productive discussion, such as grading online discussions, allowing students to choose discussion topics, and contextualizing discussions by drawing on diverse learner backgrounds and perspectives of a topic.
○	Describe the ground rules for online discussions at the start of the course by clearly describing what is expected of students, perhaps using a participation rubric.
○	Provide opportunities for socio-emotional discussions that have the goal of nurturing a strong sense of community within the course
○	Similarly, provide opportunities for authentic content-and task-oriented discussions. For large enrollments use group forums rather than class-wide forums.
	Facilitation
○	Develop social presence in the virtual classroom.
○	Avoid becoming the center of all discussions, emphasize, student-to-student interactions.
○	Attend to issues of social equity based on different cultural communication patterns.
○	Attend to issues of social equity based on different gender-related communication patterns. 
○	Increase the status of low status students in order to promote equitable collaborations. (Rovai, 2007) 
Grading discussions and monitoring participation to ensure quality contributions, sustained engagement, and establishing and maintaining a healthy social climate is something that an experienced online instructor knows how to do in an average online classroom of 20-30 participants. But even the most experienced online instructor would struggle or fail at accomplishing the same if the class size approached anywhere near the massive enrollment numbers of a MOOC. The answer then may be to anchor the MOOC in local classrooms and switch to a blended delivery, in which the course content remain online, wider collaboration at a massive scale is possible, but the social learning environment is facilitated and tended to by the local instructor; a Flipped classroom model at a massive scale. Alternatively, the  massive course enrollments of a MOOC could be divided into course sections of a manageable size, and then moderated according to well established practices in online learning. However one cuts the pie, the massive in MOOC requires attention if MOOCs want to provide a meaningful  and accessible learning experience for all students.
Critique of Methodology and Design

Six out of ten research articles published in peer reviewed journals on massive online open courses (MOOCs) were case studies on Connectivist-style  MOOCs which are courses designed on the principles of openness, networked communications, and distributed knowledge. These case studies explored technological dimensions like usability, media affordances, similarities to mobile learning, but also questions about participant retention, preferences in communication tools, learner autonomy, and distance education pedagogies. In each of the six case studies, the researcher was also a participant in the online course or network, though it was not clear to what extend the researchers observed versus engaged with the audience. It would have been helpful to have more transparency on this issue. In one study, the co-author of the article was also the content author and instructor-facilitator of the MOOC. Worth noting is that because MOOCs are such a  new phenomenon, these courses became instant grounds for research and were conceived almost as such, with participant surveys designed as part of the course.

The research design of a case study is a very appropriate tool for examining the inner workings of an online learning environment, which one would have to become a member of in order to examine, collect data, and be able to report out any findings. What was disappointing in regard to the descriptive quality of these case studies is that they did not produce the “intensive, holistic description and analysis” characteristic of a qualitative case study (Merriam, 2001). Instead they assumed that the reader was already familiar with online platforms, instructional design, technological affordances and distance education pedagogies and only discussed the research question of interest. In other words, they failed to create the necessary context for a layperson to be able to reconstruct the learning environment and to be able to meaningfully evaluate the claims of the study.

Nevertheless, the case study is very appropriate tool for examining the questions under investigation, in part because case studies allow for a rich description of the many factors that comprise an online learning environment which is affected by many choices. Starting with the choice of platforms that comprises the learning environment, the instructional possibilities of that environment, the affordances or learning opportunities these tools provide, the restraints these tools impose, and the skill sets they require of the learner to name just a few. So a very rich description of the learning environment is a necessary component for a case study of an online learning environment, especially for a MOOC, which has not been experienced before. Unfortunately, few of these case studies provided a rich description of the learning environment and its affordances/restraints; some did not even mention which tools (learning management platform and design specifications) were used to facilitate the course.
A learning management system such as Moodle, or the platforms that Coursera, Udacity, edX employ, provide the administrator of the platform with a certain amount of quantitative data, such as number of participants, reports about frequency of participation, but also qualitative data such as forum discussion, survey feedback, peer-evaluations, assignment submissions, etc. In the case of the Constructivist MOOCs which implemented up to a dozen different tools: blogs, social media sites, etc. , these tools provided additional data for analysis. The Constructivist MOOC studies examined and analyzed a combination of these data sets to answer their questions. A participant survey was a component of many of the studies to elicit feedback about demographics, motivation, preferences of tools, etc. One particular study of the CCK08 MOOC examined user preference of blogs and forums as communication and learning tools and concluded that “blogging and forum use correlated with specific individual learning style and media affordances as well as a demonstrated the maturing of users in developing their own learning networks and using new media in innovative and nuanced ways” (Mackness, Mak, and Williams, 2010). The same authors acknowledged in a different write up about the same case study titled ‘The ideals and reality of participating in a MOOC’, that “the large numbers enrolled in the course meant that the Moodle forums were swamped with messages in the early weeks (over 1000 messages to the Introductions forum from 560 participants) and course participants who found the forums daunting and overwhelming were encouraged by an instructor to leave the forums and interact from their blogs” (Mackness, Mak, and Williams, 2010). Why this was not mentioned in the previous study which examined communication one is left to wonder. About the realities in a connectivist MOOC, the authors concluded that “the more autonomous, diverse and open the course, and the more connected the learners, the more the potential for their learning to be limited by the lack of structure, support and moderation normally associated with an online course, and the more they seek to engage in traditional groups as opposed to open networks” (Mackness, Mak, and Williams, 2010).
Another study evaluated the contributions on the discussion board during a six week course on mobile learning, titled MobiMOOC “for emotive vocabulary (keywords or key-phrases) indicative of engagement with the course” (Koutropoulos, 2012). The emotive vocabulary was coded and analyzed to see whether or not they  affected participant retention in the course. The findings indicated that emotive language “did not significantly predict or impact participation retention in MobiMOOC” (Koutropoulos, 2012). As a methodology, the case studies did an excellent job asking qualitative type questions about learner experiences that could be evaluated by means of interviews, open-ended questions in a survey, or analysis of discussion board forums within the unique context of a given course environment.
The relationship between the researcher and the researched on the other hand is a topic worth exploring. Were the participants of these massive open online courses informed that data about them was being collected and reported in a research study including direct quotes of individual postings to the discussion board of CCK08? One has to assume consent or else it is the same as joining a free and open online Web 2.0 community and in exchange for free, the system collects data about its users for secondary purposes.
The relationship of the research topic to the research environment is another aspect worth considering. When a study evaluates connectivist practices in a connectivist course design taught on the subject of connectivism, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the efficacy of these practices in other learning environments or across other topics. 
In reading the individual case studies on Connectivist MOOCs, despite the lack of detail and context which is usually the strength of case study research methodology, valuable concepts about connectivism were brought to light, namely that the principles of openness, collaboration, connectivity, networking, sharing, and creating of knowledge are powerful change agents as illustrated in the MOOC phenomenon itself, and that being able to critically evaluate large amounts of information and navigate multiple technical interfaces has emerged as a new literacy of the 21st century. To what extent and in what ways our learning environments can be designed around these principles and to what degrees our learners are able to develop these literacies remain questions for further research. The limitation of these case studies is unfortunately the inability to generalize that what was learned in these individual connectivist courses has wider application for teaching and learning.
Potential and risks	
So what is the potential that MOOCs have to offer? A recent Educause virtual conference held in April 2013 explored this exact question. Michael Feldstein who hosts the e-Literate blog site along with guest blogger Phil Hill launched the conference with the provocative title “Everything You Think You Know About MOOCs Could Be Wrong”, and asked the audience to consider the following.
There are four things we think we know about MOOCs: They are “massive”, they are “open”, they are “online”, and they are “courses”. But what happens if we start playing with those truths? How massive do MOOCs need to be? How open? Do they need to be fully online? Do they even need to be courses? (Feldman and Hill, Educause excerpt, 2013)
Feldman and Hill asked us to consider non-massive “OOCs”, non-open “MOCs”, non-online “MOCs”, non-class “MOOs” courses as possible variants of the current MOOC. 
●	OOC - a “Open Online Course” in which size is limited to control for pedagogical quality, or a course in which some elements of the network is open to the world, while other elements are not
●	MOC - a “Massive Online Course” with a varying degree of openness; open-access for everyone, but for-pay textbooks, testing-services, tutoring services, etc.
●	MOC - a “Massive Open Course” available to anyone supported through blended delivery, the flipped classroom model
●	MOO- a “Massive Open Online” project, such as a project-based community rather than the traditional class structure based on lessons aligned to a calendar (Feldman et al, 2013)
Feldman and Hill speculate that “lots of experimentation and mutation will happen as people begin to recognize that MOOCs have to serve some particular purpose for students and (often, but not always) institutions” (Feldman et al, 2013). They ask us to ponder what educational problem MOOCs and their variations might help us solve, and that out of these ponderings, meaningful new adaptations will be born. For some places, open access to quality educational content will shift resources away from content development and delivery and reallocate investments into developing online infrastructure and local support services. For many places it will mean an insurgence of education start-ups providing wraparound services such as online and local testing, proctoring, tutoring and mentoring, e-books, simulations, gamification, certification, accreditation, credit-transfer evaluations, self-paced learning and most certainly the design and development of new software that allows for increased personalization of the learning platform and the creation of learner adaptive environments, to name a few. These start-ups will to some extend privatize education as traditional education environments begin to integrate and depend on these auxiliary services. This, in turn, will energize the open and creative marketplace, but also threaten the long held good of an education as a public good managed by public institutions. Furthermore, the rising cost of higher education which has tripled over the past decade along with the need to bring larger and larger parts of society into the Knowledge Age and provide higher education, will bear significant pressures on the current education system. The MOOC will appear as the solution to bring education to the masses. Already, “the California state legislature's recent move to mandate that public universities award credit for new forms of online instruction such as MOOCs raises questions about how to measure what students learn by taking these courses” (Griffith Educause virtual conference, 2013)
Effects of the movement
The biggest short-term impact the MOOC phenomenon has caused is the attention it has directed toward online learning. It has in many ways “legitimized online and hybrid learning and moved it to the center of attention in higher education” (Education Advisory Board, 2012). The biggest long-term impact is that MOOCs have invigorated the discussion around teaching pedagogy and methodology like never before, and as result have asked us to reconsider what it means to teach in the 21st century. The Flipped classroom model has emerged as a viable means for incorporating these open educational resources as a way of automating content delivery and maximizing time spent with students on providing individualized and project-based learning in active and applied learning modes. 
MOOCS have also raised the issue of digital (technology and information) literacy skills or what Howard Gardner (2007) calls “the synthesizing mind”, which requires us to make sense of a tremendous amount of available information, namely to aggregate, de-construct, critically evaluate  and communicate effectively to others about this information while navigating a multitude of virtual environments.  Possibly one of the greatest benefits of MOOCs and online education “is that it will give students a new way to put knowledge into context” (Pence 2012). The interconnectivity of the Internet provides an opportunity to deliver a curriculum that brings in experts and authentic voices, access to primary documents, multiple perspectives and an opportunity to collaborate with others and across disciplines. “In the real world, knowledge is not compartmentalized and educators now have an opportunity to bring together authentic experiences, diverse audiences, and curriculum that spans the disciplines” (Pence 2012).	
Conclusion
While MOOCs have indeed become a phenomenon, it is important to remember that they are an accelerator of existing trends, not a cause. The trend is for technology to enable us to create, collaborate, and share ideas and resources and develop new alliances and partnerships; MOOC are only one example of many to come. With rising student debt and an increased need to educate a population to meet the demands of a “knowledge society”, it is no wonder that MOOCS have attracted the attention that they have. But before buying into the hype that MOOCs will dismantle higher education, it is important to summarize the findings. Thus far, MOOC courses, while abundantly growing in offerings, do not yet provide a learning environment that can be scaled to the masses and assure learning for the average student. Some instruction might never scale to the masses and we will be reminded that learning is based on more than content, even if highly produced. Lessons to be gained from the MOOC phenomenon are that education is taking a direction into competency-based learning, that there will be an emergence of personalized and adaptive learning platforms in the future, that learner analytics will increase in importance, both for self-tracking and self-awareness as well as to make data-driven decisions, and that there will be an insurgence of alternative assessments: challenge exams, badges, prior-learning assessment, etc. 
Pedagogically, MOOCs have been the most powerful, not in delivering a new mode of instruction, but in invigorating the question, What is good teaching? They have challenged both in the classroom and in the cloud lecture models to take a good hard look at learning in a 21st century knowledge society in which information is accessible from multiple sources around the clock and created, shared, and consumed in a distributed mode. The conversation around teaching pedagogy in online or blended models has also reframed the role of the teacher from being the person that delivers the content to becoming the facilitator that guides students in their ability to access, critically examine and synthesize what is in the world’s brain, and  to help students develop the self-regulation, creative problem solving, and information literacy skills required to succeed in an information society. Most importantly, MOOCs have pointed to the need to combine technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge into an integrated design along with the social aspects of learning. 
Economically, MOOCs have accelerated the trend for the education market to increasingly privatize with many new start up companies providing educational services that the higher education market will come to depend upon. Globally, education will become even more competitive as individuals hungry for education will use open online educational resources (OERs) to advance themselves and compete against individuals with “traditional degrees”. In many ways the MOOC trend has been a call to all educators to wake up and realize that tremendous changes in educational delivery are underway and to take a careful look at the potential, pitfalls, and possibilities that MOOCs provide for their own local learning environment, at the changes they will call for, and at the problems MOOCs may help them solve. 

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