"The buzz surrounding massive open online courses, or MOOCs, has grown nearly as massive as the courses themselves. MOOCs are the new "thneeds," the oddly-shaped items peddled by the Once-ler in The Lorax: Everybody seems to want one, even if nobody yet knows exactly what they are or what they mean.
But amid all this MOOC mania, the University of Maine at Presque Isle is attempting a different kind of free online offering - one that would swap the scale of a MOOC for the high-touch experience of a conventional online course.
Michael Sonntag, the provost, calls it a "LOOC": a little open online course."
Nice short video introducing ways to make use of the discussion forums in an LMS like BBLearn. There appears to be other useful videos in this series.
Thanks to Mark Morton at Waterloo for pointing this out.