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This chapter defines MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and other forms of online learning, and describes the history of MOOCs, how they were first developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes and how they have evolved since. MOOCs are described as having two main types, xMOOCs (traditional) and cMOOCs (connectivist), but this distinction is becoming less relevant as new models for MOOC are rapidly being developed that combine elements of both or extend and change the model for one or the other. MOOCs are set in the context of the growth of online learning more generally, and statistics is provided for this and also for the growth of popularity in MOOCs. Common criticisms of MOOCs are analyzed and described, namely apparently poor retention rates and attempts to make sense of some of the discourse around this.

Definitions for MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and other forms of online learning, the history of MOOCs, how they were first developed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes and how they have evolved since have been described in this chapter. Before examining the short history of MOOCs and discussing their evolution, it is useful to understand what exactly a MOOC is and what makes it different to similar systems, in particular online learning and open educational resources (OER).

MOOCs are about 7 years old, though it is only in the last 3 years that they have achieved a widespread, global, profile. MOOCs have arisen from a long continuum of experimentation with educational technology and online learning, and with pedagogic approaches that are made possible through technology. And as with a small number of other technological innovations, the results have then been replicated many times since to create an established and well-understood model that is being used world wide.

There is no shortage of new terminology and acronyms in the field of educational technology, and many of the terms are used interchangeably, or with subtly different meanings.

The most commonly used terminology that is relevant to MOOCs is summarized below:

MOOCs have the following characteristics:

Through this work, we will use some MOOC terminology regularly. We will define these terms here in order to be clear about the differences between each of them.

MOOC(s): The individual online courses that are made available for anyone to study.

MOOC platforms: The branded online systems that are used to host MOOC courses. Coursera, EdX, Udacity, and FutureLearn are some of the best known at present.

MOOC providers: The universities or other organizations that create the MOOC courses and, in most cases, provide teaching and learning support to MOOC students through the online platform.

Even in their short history of development, MOOCs have already diversified into other models, for example, MOOCs which are aimed at smaller groups of learners and are usually available to a limited group of people, and not open to the general public; these are being called Small Private Online Courses. As the MOOCosphere develops and changes very quickly, many other new models and approaches will be developed, with varied models for learning, teaching, and delivery, and different underlying business models. The future sustainability of MOOCs as a model of higher education depends largely upon developing models that have the right combination of learners, delivery, and business model. We will discuss some of the different MOOC models in the case studies and also analyze their respective pros and cons in the final chapters of the book.

This section briefly describes the genesis of the MOOC phenomenon. The first course labeled as an MOOC was created and taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, two well-known pioneers of online learning working in Canada. Siemens and Downes share an interest in education and models of learning, with particular affiliation to a theory of learning called connectivism. Siemens is a leading academic working with this theory, while Stephen Downes in particular had long experience of working at the cutting edge of e-learning practice, leading initiatives in OER, personalized learning, and other areas, and is a respected commentator on some of the most challenging topics of the future of online education.

In 2008, the team taught a traditional, fee-paying course to 25 students at the University of Manitoba but also made the radical and far-sighted decision to open up access to the course to anyone who wished to join it online. About 2200 people joined the students on the course. The course topic was Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, connectivism being an educational theory that emphasizes the importance of connections between people and knowledge. The Internet and social media allow new possibilities for exploring connectivist approaches, as they enable communication between very large groups of people to happen quickly and easily, so the subject matter was ideally suited for the experiment that was to take place.

The hope and expectation of Siemens and Downes was that by opening up the course to a much wider and nonselective group of students, it would provide a rich and fertile ground on which to test out connectivism in practice, bringing together a small cohort of students following a formal educational route with a much larger and more diverse group of interested individuals.

So did it work? It was clearly a fascinating experiment and it comes to life as we read Downes’ updates on his experience of teaching the course (Downes, 2008) and subsequent reflections by Siemens and others (Fini, 2009). Downes muses upon the student responses to the course materials, which included weekly videos of himself and others, live discussions sessions (run twice in order to cope with the range of time zones in which students were based), an online discussion forum, and the overall course delivery system, which he adapted from his online newsletter system. Like many ground-breaking initiatives in online learning, this was a live and raw experiment where the teachers had to wrestle with technical systems to “bend” them to work how they wanted and had to carry out their own administration—registering students online in batches—as well as creating digital course materials just days or sometimes hours before they went live.

Some years after the course was taught, it is still considered to have been a success on two levels. First, as an approach to learning and teaching with a large cohort of distributed students, it proved itself to be successful: the use of the digital medium made it easy to gather data about how students interacted with the course content and their level of contribution to class...