MOOCs and the AI-Stanford Like Courses: Two Successful and Distinct Course Formats for Massive Open Online Courses
Rodriguez, C. Osvaldo

Published2012
JournalEuropean Journal of Open, Distance and E-Learning
Volume 15, Pages 13
CountryUnited States, North America

ABSTRACT
Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years.

A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an experiment by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills to the entire world. The instructors were two of the best known experts in the subject of artificial intelligence. Although students would not get Stanford University grades or credit, 20,000 from 190 countries finished the course successfully receiving a “statement of accomplishment” from the tutors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Udacity is a start-up from the authors of CS221 delivering similar massive free online courses. EdX, a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world, is one of the most recent proposals in this realm.

Massive open online courses known as connectivist MOOCs (c-MOOCs) on the other hand have been delivered since 2008. They are based on the explicit principles of connectivism (autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity) and on the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward the resources and learning.

In the research literature, newspaper and magazine articles both types of OOCs, AI-Stanford like courses (AI) and c-MOOCs, have been identified in many occasions as equivalent.

Distance education (DE) pedagogy can be classified through the evolution of three categories: cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist. These three current and future generations of DE pedagogy have an important place in a well-rounded educational experience. To a large extent, the generations have evolved in tandem with the technologies and all three models are very much in existence today and are categorized by a set of conditions.

In this paper we study in detail representative courses from AI and c-MOOC formats. We establish that although they share the use of distributed networks the format associated with c-MOOCs, which are defined by a participative pedagogical model, are unique and different from AI. We further assign to the AI to a cognitive-behaviourist (with some small contribution of social constructivist) and MOOCs to connectivist pedagogy.

Keywords massive open online course · MOOC · distance education pedagogy

LanguageEnglish
ISSN1027-5207
RefereedYes
URLhttps://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ982976
Export optionsBibTex · EndNote · Tagged XML · Google Scholar



AVAILABLE FILES
EJ982976.pdf · 267.9KB9 downloads



Viewed by 372 distinct readers




CLOUD COMMUNITY REVIEWS

The evaluations below represent the judgements of our readers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Cloud editors.

Click a star to be the first to rate this document


POST A COMMENT
SIMILAR RECORDS

Instructional quality of massive open online courses: A review of attitudinal change MOOCs
Watson, William R.; Watson, Sunnie Lee; Janakiraman, Shamila
This study builds on prior research regarding attitudinal learning MOOCs, and a study examining the quality of MOOCs based on adherence to the first principles of instruction. Nine MOOCs designed for attitudinal ...
Match: massive open online course; mooc; united states; north america

What drives a successful MOOC? An empirical examination of criteria to assure design quality of MOOCs
Yousef, Ahmed Mohamed Fahmy; Chatti, Mohamed Amine; Schroeder, Ulrik; Wosnitza, Marold
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained a lot of attention in the last years as a new technology enhanced learning (TEL) approach in higher education. MOOCs provide more educational opportunities to a massive ...
Match: successful; mooc

MOOCs: A learning journey
Smith, Becky; Eng, Min; Cheung, Simon K. S.; Fong, Joseph; et al.
MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been radically changing the direction of online education in the last few years. Although sharing many common features, there has been an emergence of two distinct varieties of ...
Match: massive open online course; mooc; north america

Coursera’s introductory human physiology course: Factors that characterize successful completion of a MOOC
Engle, Deborah; Mankoff, Chris; Carbrey, Jennifer
Since Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are accessible by anyone in the world at no cost, they have large enrollments that are conducive to educational research. This study examines students in the Coursera MOOC, ...
Match: successful; mooc

MOOC user persistence
Heutte, Jean; Kaplan, Jonathan; Fenouillet, Fabien; Caron, Pierre-André; et al.
This research explores user persistence in a massive open online course (MOOC) that was set up as an experiment before the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research launched in October 2013 the French Digital ...
Match: massive open online course; mooc

Toward successful implementation of the open access policy
Shovkovy, Igor A.
Over the last ten to fifteen years, many research universities in the United States and Europe have adopted various types of open access policies. Typically, such policies request the archiving of pre- or post-refereed ...
Match: successful; united states; north america

New models of open and distributed learning
Downes, Stephen; Jemni, Mohamed; Kinshuk; Khribi, Mohamed Koutheair
The last 100 years have seen a significant transformation in the way we understand teaching and learning. This chapter documents that change. We now understand that learning is neither merely the passive reception of ...
Match: massive open online course; mooc

Report of the Massive Open Online Course on Blended Learning Practice (BLP MOOC 2 and 3)
Cleveland-Innes, Martha; Wilton, Daniel; Jensen-Tebb, Carmen; Ostashewski, Nathaniel
This is a combined report on the second and third offering of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Blended Learning Practice (BLP) organised by Athabasca University, Canada in collaboration with the Commonwealth of ...
Match: massive open online course; mooc; north america

The Open Textbook Toolkit: Seeding successful partnerships for collaboration between academic libraries and university presses
Waller, Mira; Cross, William M.
Libraries and university presses coexist in a complex and increasingly consolidated scholarly communication ecosystem. Each brings different strengths, values, and viewpoints that can inform and enrich a joint project. ...
Match: successful; united states; north america

Negotiation and conflict resolution education in the age of the MOOC
Ebner, Noam
Even as online learning is increasingly embraced by institutions of higher education, the past decade has seen the arrival of yet another new educational vehicle: massive online open courses (MOOCs). These courses are ...
Match: mooc; united states; north america