Massive Open Online Courses: the Future of Learning?

ALA Annual 2013, Chicago #ala2013 and/or #moocFuture
Massive Open Online Courses
Michelle Keba, Heather Rayl,
Ilene Frank, Valerie Hill, PhD
The future of learning?

Massive Open Online Courses
The future of learning?

Overview
Michelle Keba
Distance & Instructional Services Librarian
Nova Southeastern University
Heather Rayl
Emerging Technology Librarian
Indiana State University
Ilene Frank
Director of Library Services
University of the People
Valerie Hill, PhD
LISD School Librarian, Adjunct Instructor
TWU School of Library and Info Studies
Introduction
Monetization
Copyright
Immersive Learning

INTRODUCTION
What are these MOOCs anyway?

MOOCs in the beginning
• First MOOC Offered in 2008
– “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge”
– Created by George Siemens and Stephen
Downes at the University of Manitoba
• At this time Dave Cormier and Bryan
Alexander coined the phrase “Massive
Open Online Course”

What made this course a MOOC?
• Massive
– Over 2,000 students signed up for the course
– Had a steady enrollment of 1,870 persistent
students
• Open
• Online
• Course

• Massive
• Open
– 24 tuition paying students from the University
of Manitoba
– 2,200 non-paying participants from around the
world
• Online
• Course

• Massive
• Open
• Online
– Information was conveyed by the instructors via a
wiki, a blog, Moodle, Elluminate, and a newsletter
– Students created Second Life communities,
blogs, concept maps, Wordle summaries, and a
Google group
• Course

• Massive
• Open
• Online
• Course
– Offered over the span of 12 weeks

A New Level of Massive
• In 2011 over 160,000 students enrolled in
an Artificial Intelligence course
• The course was co-taught by a Stanford
professor, Sebastian Thrun and Peter
Norvig, Director of Research at Google

The Launch of MOOC
Providers
• In 2012 three major providers of MOOCs,
Udacity, Coursera, and edX are launched

Udacity
• Founded by Stanford professors
Sebastian Thrun, David Stavens, and Mike
Sokolsky
• Includes 25 courses focused on business,
mathematics, computer science and
physics

Coursera
• Founded by computer science professors
Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller from
Stanford University
• Offers 378 courses from 81 partners in 25
different categories

edX
• MOOC platform founded in 2012 by MIT
and Harvard
• Partners with 27 colleges and universities
• As of June 4th, 55 courses are available for
registration

How can I search more than one
MOOC provider at once?
• MOOC Aggregators
– http://www.coursebuffet.com/
– http://www.class-central.com/

Types of MOOCs
xMOOCs vs. cMOOCs

xMOOCs
• Traditional course/lecture format
• Focus on knowledge duplication
• Emphasis on video presentations
• Follow a linear, instructor lead path
• Objective feedback from online quiz results

cMOOCs
• Based on the principles of Connectivism
• Focus on knowledge creation
• Emphasis on social networked learning
• Course path evolves from student input
• Crowd sourced learning through peer
interaction

MONETIZATION
How are these things going to sustain themselves anyway?
Image: DavidDMuir

How much does it cost
to produce a MOOC?
Image: jsawkins
Image: Ben Ellis
Image: John Ott
Image: Nomadic Lass
Image: {mostly absent}

to produce a MOOC?
Image: Nick Ares

to produce a MOOC?
$15,000 - $50,000 in production costs
100 – 300 hours preparation
8-10 hours a week during the
class

How are MOOC providers
funded?
venture capital
non-profit
$15 million
$16 million
$60 million from Harvard and MIT
grants

What are the revenue
streams?
Remedial courses for
credit for students not
prepared for college.
Complete CS master’s
degree. Courses still free, but
if you want degree, you pay
tuition.

streams?
Licensing courses for
blended learning

streams?
Wants to become self-
sustaining
Certification
Course licensing/
blended learning

It’s all about volume.
“There's going to be a lot of
information about these people
taking tests…Just like Facebook
makes money…The Silicon Valley
view of things in this sort of space
is, first, get the volume. Once you
get the volume, then you've got the
data. Once you've got the data, you
sell the data.”
Photo credit: Narissa Escanlar

MOOCS AND COPYRIGHT
Open Courses and Access to Resources

Resources for registered students
• We license material from vendors
• We link to open educational resources
• We invoke rights to fair use, the provisions of the
TEACH Act
• We know who to ask for help if copyright
questions arise

What about open courses? A
variety of “students”!
MOOC students
• may have no academic affiliation with our institution
– or any other
• may not be near a public library
• may be from anywhere on the planet
• may have different demographics than students we
usually serve
• may not have the best technology - or different
technology (older computers, mobile tech, limited
Internet access)

MOOCs - Operative Term “Open”
So what kinds of materials can we use in
online open courses?
• Open educational resources
• Proprietary resources
– Licensed ? For 140,000 students who are not
registered at our institution?
– Fee-based ? For 140,000 students??
– Fair use ?
– Permission ?

What resources are used?
Two Examples
• A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Economic
Behavior (Duke)
• E-Learning and Digital Media (University
of Edinburgh)

Dan Ariely’s Beginner’s Guide to
Irrational Behavior (Duke)
• A bundle of Professor Dan’s popular books via
Amazon. Geo-blocked!
• Video lectures and Google Hangouts
• Many readings from academic journals and
some non-scholarly sources such as the New
York Times. Over 400 pages of required
reading.

E-Learning and Digital Media
• Video clips – trailers, animated shorts, etc. from
YouTube, Vimeo
• Readings from open access scholarly journals
• Some secondary reading suggestions were not available
for free online
• Students shared their digital artifacts on the course site –
and via links.
• Students were reminded about copyright and the use of
digital images , etc. in their projects

Make Some Deals, Get
Permission
• Kevin Smith tells how contacting the
media dept of a textbook publisher was
effective
• Coursera has made deals with some
textbook publishers to allow use in
MOOCs

Who owns the course?
Who owns student work?
• For stand-alone open courses it’s up to
each institution to set policies
• For MOOCs using other platforms
(Coursera, edX, Udacity, etc.), check the
Terms of Service.

Coursera Terms of Use
https://www.coursera.org/about/terms
Take the course –
but don’t take anything (?)

Coursera: Students Permission
to Use Material
• https://www.coursera.org/about/terms
• Permission to Use Materials
• All content or other materials available on the Sites, including but not limited
to code, images, text, layouts, arrangements, displays, illustrations, audio
and video clips, HTML files and other content are the property of Coursera
and/or its affiliates or licensors and are protected by copyright, patent and/or
other proprietary intellectual property rights under the United States and
foreign laws. In consideration for your agreement to the terms and
conditions contained here, Coursera grants you a personal, non-exclusive,
non-transferable license to access and use the Sites. You may download
material from the Sites only for your own personal, non-commercial use.
You may not otherwise copy, reproduce, retransmit, distribute, publish,
commercially exploit or otherwise transfer any material, nor may you modify
or create derivatives works of the material. The burden of determining that
your use of any information, software or any other content on the Site is
permissible rests with you.

Coursera:
User material submission
• By submitting the Feedback, you hereby
grant Coursera and the Participating
Institutions an irrevocable license to use,
disclose, reproduce, distribute, sublicense,
prepare derivative works of, publicly
perform and publicly display any such
submission.

Course ownership: Coursera and
U of Illinois example
• Does the University retain ownership of the content in a
Coursera course?
• The content in our MOOCs is governed by the same rules of
ownership as apply to our on-campus or traditional online
courses, i.e., unless otherwise agreed to by the instructor,
intellectual property rights to any course content created by
the instructor independently and at the instructor’s initiative,
rest with the instructor. Where the course support provided by
the University is over and above the University resources
usually and customarily provided, as will likely be the case
with most MOOCs, course content created by the instructor
shall be owned by the instructor and licensed to the
University. See “The General Rules Concerning University
Organization and Procedure,” Article III, particularly Section
4(b) at http://www.bot.uillinois.edu/general-rules.

Contrast: OERu – OER only
OER university
• A collaboration of
universities to provide
courses for self-directed
learners using open
content (with no cost to
students)
• Collaborating
universities will assess
the work and offering
credits (with some cost
to students)

MOOCS, IMMERSIVE
LEARNING, AND THE FUTURE

How we collaborated
• We met on twitter #moocmooc
• We contacted by email
• We talked on google hangouts
• We presented in Second Life
• We did a run-through on Blackboard
Collaborate

How we learned
• We collected a literature review
• We used content curation
• We explored MOOCs

Mighty Bell: Collaboration
Space

MOOCs
&
Librarians
ACRL
Virtual World Interest Group
Feb. 17th, 2013
Panelists:
Valerie Hill, PhD
Michelle Keba
Ilene Frank
George Djorgovski

My research topic:
Virtual World
Librarianship
Hill, Valerie (2012). Factors contributing to the adoption of
virtual worlds by librarians. PhD Dissertation, Texas
Woman's University.

Coursera: Top Universities offer MOOCs
MOOCs on Library
and
Information Topics

Coursera MOOC

Can a MOOC take place in a
virtual world?
• Massive (virtual worlds can hold only so
many avatars)
• Open (virtual worlds are open on a global
scale)
• Online (virtual worlds are online)
• Courses (Courses can take place- both
synchronous and asychronous)

MOOC Classmates

Anne Frank MOOC
Fall 2012
Educators met weekly for MOOC
office hours on Wed. evenings.
Assignments presented in
a 3D virtual world.
Students “enter”
the cramped annex
where Anne Frank
lived
in hiding.

Mixed Reality & Media
Formats

Experience History in 3D

Collaboration Across Distance
Meeting for “class
in the park in
Amsterdam”

Exploration of new media is
like “entering the book”.

Personal Reflection
Immersion in the
experience can help
students understand
history on a deep,
personal level.

Advantages of MOOCs
• No cost (or low cost)
• Personal interest
• Convenient (no travel)
• Access to experts and global participants

Disadvantages of MOOCs
• Lack of assessment
• Accreditation & quality assurance
• Future of academic careers
• Potential for isolation

Can MOOCs provide high quality resources and
opportunities to promote information literacy?
The future is ripe with possibilities.

Role of Information Literacy Librarian
•Taking the library to new spaces
•Embedded librarians
•Redesigning our physical spaces
•Balancing tradition & innovation

Information Literacy
in the Digital Age
• Intellectual freedom
• Intellectual property
• Critical inquiry
• Evaluation of content
• Navigation of the “flood”

Role of Personal Responsibility
(We live in a global, participatory, digital culture.)

The library and the librarian
are not synonymous.
Take a risk and go where no
librarian has gone before!
“It may be that the great age of libraries is waning, but I am here
to tell you that the great age of librarians is just beginning. It’s up
to you to decide if you want to be a part of it.”
~T. Scott Plutchak

Contact Us
Michelle Keba
Distance & Instructional Services Librarian
Nova Southeastern University
Heather Rayl
http://HeatherRayl.com
Ilene Frank
http://sites.google.com/site/ilenefrank/
Valerie Hill, PhD
http://vhill.edublogs.org/
vhilledu@gmail.com
Introduction
@operopis
@ifrank
@valibrarian

Massive Open Online Courses: the Future of Learning?

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