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"the key reasons include: 1. branding and affiliation with elite institutions and professors, 2. well established courses with rich support on resources and assessment (grading/peer assessment), 3. granting of certificates of achievement or statements of attainment (in recognition), 4. degrees of difficulties - xMOOCs are much easier compared to cMOOCs, 5. perceptions of learners - xMOOCs are based on 1,2,3 above, and 4 - learners - cMOOCs would have to curate resources and create blog posts/join forums, 6. pedagogy, 7. assessment."

"The xMOOC path is pretty much in place with EdX. They have a good module-based system for presenting and assessing instructivist knowledge. Add on top of that they have connected to other systems through single sign-on and they are down with APIs… they have a system that is ready to connect with other systems as well as allow learners to move in and out as need with ease. The cMOOC system that sits alongside that? That is another beast. Technology exists to create a learner-centered system (see A Domain of One's Own)…. but how does this scale to possibly tens of thousands of learners?"

"Should MOOC be designed to support specific personal learning objectives, whilst not compromising the specific course (or commercial) objectives?"

" XMOOC, cMOOC, BOOC, DOCC and SPOC--are you up to speed on all the different flavors of MOOCs? Alex Cusack from MOOCs.com has compiled this handy infographic to help you make sense of the alphabet soup along with major MOOC providers, trends, and student demographics. "

"'CCK08' was a unique event on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge within a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in 2008. It was a course and a network about the emergent practices and the theory of Connectivism, proposed by George Siemens as a new learning theory for a digital age. It was convened and led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens through the University of Manitoba, Canada. Although the event was not formally advertised, more than 2000 participants from all over the world registered for the course, with 24 of these enrolled for credit."

"The person taking the MOOC is like a person reading a book, playing a game, or taking a trip to the city. It is impossible to talk about 'the objective' of such an activity - some people want to learn something (and others something else), others are doing it for leisure (and others as part of their job), others to make friends (and others to get away from their friends for a while), etc."

"This kind of learning can't be scaffolded or too-carefully architectured but must be discovered in the act. In A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown write, "Our understanding comes not through a linear progression, in which each step confirms that you are on the right path. Rather, it arises through approaching the problem from many angles and ultimately seeing its logic only at the end" (98)."

"Most of the conversations were about the pitfalls of producing MOOCs. I wanted to talk more about how universities that may use other schools' MOOCs might consume them. Most of the people here are from disciplines outside of the humanities, so I tried to explain that what works in math or CS will not necessarily work for history, especially history survey classes. While everyone seemed interested in improving pedagogy, there was a kind of disturbing assumption underlying all my discussions that any class that doesn't use technology is somehow broken by definition."