Online Learning Update

July 6, 2013

MOOCs and Online Education; a real difference

Filed under: Online Learning News — Ray Schroeder @ 12:01 am

by Jim Farmer, e-literate

Are online education and MOOC the same? Is any difference important? MOOC – Massive Open Online Course. As currently interpreted, massive meaning hundreds of thousands of student taking the course, open meaning free for the student, and online referring to the way the course is offered over the Internet. Joshua Kim, writing in Inside Higher Education, believes there is more to online education than MOOCs. Online education includes all of the online courses colleges and universities have been offering for several decades using many different instructional technologies. Kim differentiated between the two when he commented on John Tamny’s Forbes article “Online Education Will Be the Next ‘Bubble’ To Pop, Not Traditional University Learning”. Kim labeled Tamny’s work “Confused Reporting.” When Tamny is saying that online education is the next bubble he is of course not talking about the sort of online education that any of us working in the field of designing, teaching, or supporting online courses would recognize. Tamny is talking about MOOCs. Kim labels this misuse as conflation.

http://mfeldstein.com/moocs-and-online-education-a-real-difference/

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