by David Hamilton, the WHIR
MOOCs are delivered through a Virtual Learning Environment, an application that enables an educator to run online lectures, deliver multimedia, administer tests, assign homework, mark assignments, and grade students. A good deal of the potential of MOOCs is dependent on these VLEs, but also the hosting infrastructure and technology that supports the VLE as it delivers a MOOC to thousands and tens-of-thousands of students. There are plenty of options for an educational institution to consider when rolling out a MOOC: join a course aggregator network like Coursera, spend time and money on building their own solution, buy proprietary software and hosting, use Google Course-Builder which runs on Google App Engine, or host an open-source app like Moodle.
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