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The first course carrying the name MOOC was offered in 2008, so this is new phenomenon. Second, the pedagogical style of the early courses, which we shall call cMOOCs, was based on a philosophy of connectivism and networking. This is quite distinct from the xMOOCs now being developed by elite US institutions that follow a more behaviourist approach. Third, the few academic studies of MOOCs are about the earlier offerings because there has been no time for systematic research on the crop of 2012 xMOOCs. Analysis of the latter has to be based on a large volume of press articles and blogs. Fourth, commentary on MOOCs includes thinly disguised promotional material by commercial interests (e.g. Koller, 2012) and articles by practitioners whose perspective is their own MOOC courses.

The term MOOC originated in Canada. Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander coined the acronym to describe an open online course at the University of Manitoba designed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The course, Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, was presented to 25 fee-paying students on campus and 2,300 other students from the general public who took the online class free of charge (Wikipedia, 2012a).

Can xMOOCs make money?

  E-Pedagogy: Does e-learning require a new pedagogy?  5 The emergence of e-learning  As part of the technological revolution, the use of e-learning, or blended learning, isincreasing. This is particularly true of Higher Education, which offers most programmespartly or wholly online. In the future, e-learning is likely to be more widely used in thetertiary and school sectors. Another driver for e-learning is life-long learning, whichrequires on-going training and re-training of the adult workforce.In many cases, e-learning is delivered through a virtual learning environment (VLE),which is a custom built environment designed for online learning. VLEs, such as  Blackboard and Moodle , typically provide all of the software tools required for onlinelearning such as communication and file sharing facilities. These environments are oftenmodelled around the traditional campus, providing ‘virtual staff rooms’ and ‘onlinecommon rooms’. E-portfolios provide the digital equivalent to the traditional paperportfolio; these typically provide online storage for a range of media types (such asdrawings, photos and videos). Dedicated e-assessment systems, such as Questionmark ,facilitate large-scale online testing, providing many of the question types that arefamiliar to teachers.Some academics have pointed out the potential of e-learning to improve current practice.Garrison and Anderson (2003) write:“E-learning has significantpotential to alter the nature of theteaching and learning transaction.In fact, it has caused us to face upto some of the current deficienciesof higher education, such as largelecturers, while providing somepossible solutions or ways tomitigate these shortcomings. Seenas part of pedagogical solution, e-learning becomes an opportunity toexamine and live up to the ideals of the educational transactiondescribed previously.” New learning opportunities The changing environment facilitates new kinds of learning. Teachers have traditionallyfocussed on content; indeed, many consider the identification and delivery of learningmaterial to be their prime role. But it has been argued that the traditional skill of contentcreation is redundant in the information-rich learning environment. Some of this contentis very high quality, even world class, and certainly superior to a hurriedly producedhandout of the type often used by busy teachers.It has been suggested that the contemporary teacher should be more “guide on the side”than “sage on the stage”. The ready availability of information makes  facilitation moreimportant than direction . The pedagogic issue is not too little information but too much:the contempora

changing learning landscape poses fundamental epistemological questions about thenature of knowledge and how it is acquired. Dede (2008) writes: “In the Classicalperspective, knowledge consists of accurate interrelationships among facts, based onunbiased research that produces compelling evidence about systematic causes […]Epistemologically, a single right answer is believed to underlie each phenomenon […]The epistemology that leads to validity of knowledge in Web 2.0 media such as Wikipedia  is peer review from people seen, by the community of contributors, as having unbiasedperspectives. Expertise involves understanding disputes in detail and proposingsyntheses that are widely accepted by the community

hatever new theory of learning emerges in thenext decade, it will likelybuild upon thesepedagogie