Abstract:

This paper is about innovation in MOOCs, and about how MOOCs are building a new pedagogy that better fits the way we socialize in the Internet.

Generally, MOOCs have been replicating the traditional school model of lecturing, readings, and tests. They have done it in short video format or smaller versions of a semester-long course. There are interesting cases in MOOCs that are trying to find alternative ways of organizing learning in the massive online world. In this work, I have reviewed seven innovative MOOCs (from Coursera, edX, and other platforms), and their pedagogical strategies, such as: organizing hundreds of local, face-to-face groups to complement the online learning, include action-learning activities as part of the learning process, organize a social movement with the MOOC participants, use social media platforms to tap into the immense knowledge ocean of the MOOC participants, or even propose no syllabus to let the network 'find it's way' into emerging learning, among others. The success varies, but the interesting aspect is all these examples is that these pedagogues are trying to take advantage of the collective wisdom and expertise that exists in the thousands of learners that join a MOOC as a source for massive learning, something that main MOOC 'industry' is not yet doing.

For the last two years, I have been part of the development team for a MOOC at McGill University 'Social Learning for Social Impact'. During this time, we have been piloting and testing some of these strategies in classrooms and in the online world in order to bring the effective ones into our MOOC--to be resealed in edX.org next Fall. I would love to share the insights of this research on 'Innovations in MOOCs' and the lessons from the experience in the development of our MOOC.

I believe the real innovation of MOOCs is yet to come, and it is based on unleashing the immense source of knowledge and expertise that exists in the thousands of participants, and to build social-technological structures that allow for this source to reach its collective learning potential. Some of these examples shed some light in this direction, but the real and new MOOC model of learning is still in formation. We need to think critically and experiment proactively on MOOCs.

Keywords:

MOOCs, Innovation, Collective Learning, Internet Constructivism.