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We chose to use a collaborative constructivist approach to designing our open online seminar because it is consistent with our beliefs about teaching people how to “learn how to learn,” and it is an approach that can take advantage of online collaboration, dialogue, connections and inquiry.

The next generation MOOC (I’ll go ahead and coin ngMOOC now — you’re welcome) will have to employ more of a feedback loop to the student. Understanding the issues with social learning at scale, most progressive MOOC providers are finding ways to utilize graduate students, or simply more advanced students, like Seniors, who have already taken a course, to help push conversation and assessment. By seeding courses with large clusters of “more knowledgeable others” (as Vygotsky would call them), providers theorize they can get at the kind of learning communities desired to make a MOOC work at scale. So, essentially the next generation of MOOC combines the worlds of the xMOOC and the cMOOC, by using computers to do as much simulated instruction and assessment as possible, while making up for communication and community flaws through social construction. Wait, maybe the next generation MOOC should be an “xcMOOC” — you’re welcome again.

For instance, as I’ve noted before, a number of schools are working to crack the $10,000 Baccalaureate degree. To do so, it is likely that these schools and programs will need to employ the MOOC concept (whether their solutions need to include “massive” courses is yet to be determined). That means using reusable, self-paced, socially networked courses to free up typical administrative or teaching overhead. That means using more machine learning for grading, adaptivity, and personalization.

Are MOOCs over-hyped and dying? I don’t think so.