Saint Mary’s College Conference
Teachers, Teaching and the Media Conference
October 16th to 18th
Panel: Alternative Communities, Alternative Stories: Experimenting with Moocs, Community Television, and Cinema
Friday, October 17th / with By: Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli and Kristi Wilson
MOOCs and Social Media (pdf file)
A discussion about MOOCs, courses and the idea of “open”
By Fabian Banga
Online education has experienced tremendous growth over the last decade, spurred by a combination of technological innovations, economic drivers, and changing demographics. Today, more than one third of the nation’s college students take courses online. According to the latest survey by the College Board and Babson Survey Research Group, Changing Course: Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States (2013), over 6.7 million students at four-year institutions in the United States were taking at least one online course during the fall of 2011, an increase of more than half a million, or 9.3 percent, over 2010 (Babson, 2013).
In this context we have experienced the rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). But what are MOOCs? Can we consider MOOCs a phenomenon associated with online education or just a continuation of the space associated with social media? Are they products of our neoliberal society? We will have a discussion about MOOCs and question of what the “C” means. Are MOOCs courses or online events? We will discuss how to teach in the open internet without learning outcomes. Finally, we will question the word “course” or at least demand a clarification of what constitutes a course. We will discuss an example of a MOOC I offered in spring 2013 at Berkeley City College.