MOOCs vs. University Online Courses

I’m in the process of taking my second online MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) with Coursera.  I’ve been teaching online classes for UMass Boston over the last 6 years.  These UMass courses have taken the traditional semester long courses and in many ways their structures and moved them into a online environment.   These online courses have had the typical 10-25 students foll lowing along with material that would be somewhat similar to what is delivered in an face-to-face class.

The similarities of the MOOC with the UMass online offerings are the following:

• Instruction is by a university or institutionally validated inidivudal
• Classes have a defined start and end date
• Course materials are released in a sequential nature
• There are assignments and assessments
• Students may be very geographically dispersed
• Lectures via PowerPoint and instructor audio or video are present

Yet there are concrete differences between the two. In the MOOC,

• There are thousands of students.
• One on one Interactions with professor and teaching assistants are limited.
• The role of the study group and peer learning community becomes much more important for parsing out confusion
• The two courses I have taken were free
• Individual motivation and agency in learning becomes much more important
• External validation via a degree is not present, but I can get “certifications”
• Not sure how more subjective work such as essays would be assessed and validated — guess I should take a literature course