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I’ve been humbled all over again by the innovation, ingenuity, and dedication of teachers — to their field, to their subject matter, and to anonymous students worldwide. My favorite is Professor Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania who teaches ModPo (Modern and Contemporary American Poetry) as a seminar.  Each week students, onsite and online, discuss a poem in real time. There are abundant office hours, discussion leaders, and even a phone number you can call to discuss your interpretations of the week’s poem. ModPo students are so loyal that, when Al gave a talk at Duke, several of his students drove in from two and three states away to be able to testify to how much they cherished the opportunity to talk about poetry together online. Difficult contemporary poets who had maybe 200 readers before now have thousands of passionate fans worldwide.

Interestingly, MOOCs turn out to be a great advertisement for the humanities too. There was a time when people assumed MOOC participants would only be interested in technical or vocational training. Surprise! It turns out people want to learn about culture, history, philosophy, social issues of all kinds. Even in those non-US countries where there is no tradition of liberal arts or general education, people are clamoring to both general and highly specialized liberal arts courses.

First let’s talk about the MOOC makers, the professors. Once the glamor goes away, why would anyone make a MOOC? I cannot speak for anyone else — since it is clear that there is wide variation in how profs are paid to design MOOCs — so let me just tell you my arrangement. I was offered $10,000 to create and teach a MOOC. Given the amount of time I’ve spent over the last seven months and that I anticipate once the MOOC begins, that’s less than minimum wage. I do this as an overload; it in no way changes my Duke salary or job requirement. More to the point, I will not be seeing a penny of that stipend. It’s in a special account that goes to the TAs for salary, to travel for the assistants to go to conferences for their own professional development, for travel to make parts of the MOOC that we’ve filmed at other locations, for equipment, and so forth. If I weren’t learning so much and enjoying it so much or if it weren’t entirely voluntary (no one put me up to this!), it would be a rip off. I have control over whether my course is run again or whether anyone else could use it.

Interestingly, since MOOCs, I have heard more faculty members — senior and junior — talking about the quality of teaching and learning than I have ever heard before in my career.

9. The best use of MOOCs may not be to deliver uniform content massively but to create communities and networks of passionate learners galvanized around a particular topic of shared interest. To my mind, the potential for thousands of people to work together in local and distributed learning communities is very exciting. In a world where news has devolved into grandstanding, badgering, hyperbole, accusation, and sometimes even falsehood, I love the greater public good of intelligent, thoughtful, accurate, reliable content on deep and important subjects — whether algebra, genomics, Buddhist scripture, ethics, cryptography, classical music composition, or parallel programming (to list just a few offerings coming up on the Coursera platform). It is a huge public good when millions and millions of people worldwide want to be more informed, educated, trained, or simply inspired.

The “In our meta-MOOC” seems to me to be an over complication, and is in fact describing the original MOOC (now referred to as cMOOC) based around concepts of Connectivism (Downes & Siemens) itself drawing on Communities of Practice theory of learning (Wenger). This work was underway in 2008 http://halfanhour.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/mooc-resurgence-of-community-in-online.html