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"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."

"MOOCs, however, are a game-changer, for a lot of reasons. I won't hash out all the pros and cons here. (I'm on the pro side.) But whatever the potential faults or limitations of MOOCs, the fact that they are free and open to all makes them, at least, a good place for low-stakes experiments. And that quality makes them extremely valuable to people who otherwise can't easily get themselves into a student desk, including college teachers. In short, MOOCs give us access to a simulation of the college student experience. Let me explain how that worked for me recently."

"As Bakary Diallo, a professor from the African Virtual University, reportedly remarked at a recent meeting among international educators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students in other parts of the world have their "own realities," their "own context and culture." It would be absurd to ignore how significantly those realities shape students' participation in our virtual classrooms."

Open online course from the GMCTE aimed at novices interested in learning technologies.