Have you heard of MOOCs?

‘I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand’

                                                    - Confucius

MOOC is the acronym for Massive Open Online Course, an ICT platform developed 5 years back in response to developments in Open Educational Resources. The idea is simple. Provide learners who share a common desire for learning a particular course, a platform where they can participate, collaborate, and engage with each other. The principle being that information is everywhere and learning is just a click away. So how does this platform work? Let’s see some of its characteristics:

• MOOC, as the name is suggests is an online course having most of the basic elements of an offline course: facilitators, course material, a start date and an end date.
• It is OPEN. And that means it’s accessible to anyone with a computer and an decent Internet connection. Most MOOC platforms do not require payments, so people are free to participate and learn. However, a learner would need to pay in case he needs course credits from a university. Work is openly shared amongst all learners in the network.
• It is PARTICIPATORY. Learners are not asked to complete specific assignments, rather engage with others by contributing web material to the topic of study. Apart from acquiring knowledge, learners build a strong network with the people participating in the learning process.
• It is DISTRIBUTED. All the material is connected through various social media channels such as YouTube, Twitter, Blogs, etc. This material is divided into pockets and clusters based on the area of study. It is important to note that learners have complete flexibility in defining their learning path and so they can customize their learning path within different subject clusters. What's more, learning paths continuously develop as people add content, building a large, distributed knowledge base.
• It supports LIFELONG NETWORKED LEARNING. People who desire independence and their own workspace can continuously learn at their own pace and maintain the network even after the learning is over.
• A MOOC lets you choose what you want to learn, how you want to learn, and your desired learning outcomes so that only you can tell whether you have been successful.

So who’s providing MOOCs? There are several MOOC providers that offer a variety of courses. From the basics of MS Excel to learning how to knit, you can not only choose from a large range of classes, but also request for classes or teach them as well!  Most MOOC providers allow users to download learning materials provided the data is reused strictly for non-commercial purposes and full attribution is given to the creator of the content.

MOOC providers differ in their approach and delivery model. Companies such as Coursera strive towards making world-class learning accessible to everyone. To achieve this mission, Coursera  provides courses that are delivered by sought after instructors from world-class universities such as Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Columbia, and Duke. More than 60 universities are part of Coursera’s network. Here’s a sample of an upcoming session on Operations Management taught by Christian Terwiesch from the The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Another hugely popular website, KhanAcademy, has revolutionized the concept of MOOCs by providing videos in short lecture formats. It boasts of more than 3000 videos, largely created by its founder Salman Khan. Seeing these providers, a growing number of universities are joining the bandwagon to deliver courses from their faculty. Currently, all universities cite this initiative as a part of their social responsibility and as a means of technology transfer thatreaches a broader audience.

While companies such as Coursera and Khan Academy provide free learning material, others such as Udacity, Udemy, and Skillshare have monetized the MOOC platforms, and are backed by VC firms. In the weeks to come, I shall discuss the business models of some of these companies, but for now it is safe to say that there is a huge market for commercialized online learning having tremendous implications for diverse employment sectors.

By offering a platform that democratizes learning, MOOCs may well be the future of learning. What MIT’s OpenCourseWare did to content, MOOCs may do to teaching. New features around MOOCs continue to develop, expanding the horizon of learning. Stanford’s MOOC, for example, provides students an opportunity to ask questions to the instructor, with questions being ranked according to their popularity. As one of the popular MOOC instructors at Stanford, Sebastian Thrun, points out that these platforms provide all learners an opportunity to answer questions which they couldn’t get a chance to answer in regular classroom settings, as another student had exercised the opportunity to give the correct answer. Moreover, students can keep practicing until they master the content. According to this NYT article by Tamar Lewin, improvements in technology and the exploding costs of traditional universities may ultimately break the walls of elitist institutions. If the signs are anything to go by, an exciting journey of learning beckons all of us.

I can see my dad smiling.