Overview of papers on enhancement of European Higher Education as presented during the Online, Open and Flexible Higher Education Conference in Rome, October 2016

When Clayton Christensen labeled MOOC as a ‘disruptive innovation’ he was only referring to the changes MOOCs represented for the business models of the education industry (Christensen et.al. 2014). When it comes to the perspective of pedagogy or the perspective of democratizing access to high quality education there is yet to be seen any disruption caused by MOOCs.

In my paper I’ll focus on what it takes for MOOCs to truly become an element of the democratizing of education. I will analyse different barriers in most existing MOOCs whether they value flexibility in access to learning resources (aka xMOOCs) or participation in an active learning community of knowledge construction (aka xMOOCs). The MOOCs’ prerequisites for inner motivation, knowledge construction, and study techniques creates together with the lack of guidance insurmountable obstacles for many potential learners.

Next I’ll look into the different pedagogical approaches in online learning that are focused on engaging students facilitating and scaffolding a learning community. I’ll focus on how social learning can become part of a MOOC pedagogy drawing on ‘social learning theory’ (Bandura), ‘pedagogy for a digital age’ (ex: Beetham, Conole)’, ‘community of inquiry’ and online presence (Garrison), and social media in education (ex: Nussbaum‐Beech et.al.). Besides the two existing models xMOOC and cMOOC I’ll suggest a third: the MOOSL (Massive Open Online....

Keywords

MOOCs · open education · Scaffolded Online Learning · social learning