MOOCs Theories, Trends, Critics, and Life Sciences Applications: Updates on MOOCs

MOOCs Are Divided Into Two Types: cMOOCs and the Other One Is xMOOCs

xMOOCs basically focus On concise, targeted video content with short duration videos and use automated testing to check students understanding of the content. They include discussion forums and allow people to share their ideas and discuss amongst this group. The central idea always rotates around the instructor guided lessons. Each student’s journey throughout the course is linear, simple and defined. Learning is seen as something that can be tested competently and certified (Kesim, 2015).

Video lectures are indeed an improvement to the conventional lectures as it involves much more engaging experience for the learners. This could help the learner absorb the material and thereafter facilitates automated testing process which could review the requirements of the individual learners. The main drawback is of course the missing of one-to-one interaction and easy back-and-forth, questioning that can happen at the end of a formal lecture. No matter the questions can still find its way to the instructor through the teaching assistants if enough people deem them to be important, but it is so not a spontaneous process as in the case of conventional mode of classroom teaching (Mazoue, 2013).

When an individual sets his own learning goal and type of engagement, it results into a personal and subjective experience which is based on Connectivism. These are called the cMOOCs. Canadian researchers George Siemens, Stephen Downes, and Dave Cormier created MOOCs. Thus, many sources refer to cMOOCs as connectivist MOOCs or as Canadians MOOC (John, 2015).

They prepared the concept based on the principles of the theory of connectivism. The theory of connectivism and its basic principles can be considered useful for better understanding of MOOCs (Kop, 2011; Frances, 2011).