Serendipity35

Cours­era, EdX, Udac­ity are still the big names in providing Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), but the definitions of "Open" and even "Course" have been changing since I first started listing providers on this blog. Some of the providers in the numbered list below are no longer using content that is open for reuse or sharing. And some courses are not really "courses" in the traditional definition, as they do not have assignments, grades etc. They might be thought of more as Communities or Conversations.

Although a number of these providers offer some non-English courses and almost all have enrollment open to all countries, there are more providers starting outside the United States that focus on other languages, geographical sectors and universities outside the U.S.

Here are a few providers outside the U.S. 

• European universities have collaborated to launch a joint MOOC portal OpenupEd.eu with support from the European Commission, the initiative is the most comprehensive offering of European MOOCs


• Open Learn - Open University (UK)


• mooc.fr - dédié à des MOOCs francophones - a site dedicated to Francophone MOOCs

1. Coursera


2. EdX


3. Udacity


4. Curricki


5. Udemy


6. NovoEd first launched at Stanford as VentureLab, now private


7. Class Central - aggregates Stanford, Coursera, MIT and Harvard led edX (MITx + Harvardx + BerkeleyX), and Udacity courses


8. Blackboard offers its CourseSites platform for free courses and MOOCs


9. Canvas Network - free and courses for a fee from Instructure using their Canvas LMS


10. Open Learning Global


11. P2PU   peer to peer university


12. SyMynd courses from NYU, University of Washington and McGill University


13. Carnegie Mellon University Open Learning Initiative


14. Open Yale courses (Yale joined with Coursera in May 2013)


15. Stanford's Free Online Courses


16. MOOC2Degree works with public universities to offer credit-bearing MOOCs as a free, first step toward earning a degree.

The following four providers offer course materials without facilitators or discussions. A do-it-yourself course, perhaps, or a resource for teachers searching for materials to use in their own courses.

• WikiEducator


• Wikiversity


• Apple's iTunesU does not provide a list of courses but this wiki has a list of affiliate schools & courses. 


• MIT Open Courseware

Several other sites are listing MOOC providers, though there is no definitive "one-stop" aggregation site where you can go and easily search a catalog of all the MOOCs currently available. mooc-list.com is one such site, but sites are also appearing that a commercial/advertising intent along with offering a way to search. (An example is Russian website at studymooc.org) The mooc.ca site also offers a list of open online courses of different types.

There are myths about all technologies and innovations, and MOOCs, being very buzzworthy the past year, certainly have created a few.

An article in the EDUCAUSE Review this month online has five MOOC myths it covers.

The quick list is:
1. It's All about Money
2. MOOCs Create a Two-Tier Educational System
3. MOOCs Are Inherently Inferior
4. MOOCs Are Mechanistic
5. We've Seen How This Plays Out

We can argue if those are myths and if those are the five most important, but they all have some validity in being included in our MOOC discussion. You can read the article for details, but that fifth myth - We've Seen How This Plays Out - is the one that most interested me.

Many in education (I hesitate to say "educators") quickly wrote off MOOCs as just another technology-related educational fad. Naysayers say that technology will not save education. Maybe education doesn't need saving, but the MOOC has been thrown into the mix with articles about predicting the end of education as we know it.

I suspect many of my readers have seen a presentation that includes some slide about how at one time the blackboard, phonograph, radio, films, television, VCR, CD, and online learning were going to revolutionize education. And they did not.

It turns out that most of these technologies have been more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. I suspect the MOOC will follow that model.

But the article points out that one thing that might set MOOCs apart from earlier attempts to adapt technological innovation to education is "their potential for enabling individualized learning." Rather than being ways of "packaging information," MOOCs might change the conventional classroom practice of presentation and delivery of content much more than online learning changed (or failed to change) it.

There are still plenty of sages on stages in higher education and in K-12 classrooms. The MOOC model might just change our focus from "where or from whom one receives instruction" to "how the learning process is designed."

The MOOC is a disruptor, but it may evolve into something else in a few years that really is a game-changer. If you believe in the Hype Cycle, then you might look to other disruptors like Google, Amazon, Facebook, iPhone, iTunes, Netflix and even the Internet itself as disruptors that were once taken much less seriously and our now just part of our lives.

Have we seen the MOOC before? We certainly have seen big (though not massive) courses and free courses and lots of opportunities to learn online. But another consideration the article points us to is that the MOOC has occurred at a time when other trends are active in education. It might be more important to consider how MOOCs mix with these trends to be something more.

The trends that seem to be converging now along with the rise of the MOOC are: what the learning sciences are telling us about changing educational practices; a shift from seat-time to competency-based assessment models; the possible unbundling of knowledge acquisition from credits, credentials and degrees and a global economy where the current model just seems incompatible.

Finally, the article's author, James G. Mazoue, says that

Those who cavalierly dismiss MOOCs as just another fad need to recognize that their significance consists not in their present state but in what they have the potential to become: an evolving model that combines the learning sciences with competency-based assessment. Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative is an example of the first, and Western Governors University is an example of the second. The two models these examples represent have yet to converge. If they were to merge into a unified model, they could serve as a catalyst for creating — not the "MOOCpocalypse" — but a hybrid at the nexus of learning optimization and competency-based credentialing that offers more open, scalable, affordable, and improved forms of learning. Even at this nascent stage of their development, what we are witnessing in MOOCs is not a race to the bottom but rather a progressive upward movement toward operationalizing an infrastructure for learning optimization. Why, then, do the MOOC deniers wish to thwart their incubation and seek their demise?

Open Access promo buttons - photo by biblioteekje, on Flickr

I was listening recently to an episode of The Chronicle's Tech Therapy podcast on the "Moral Imperative" for Open Access to scholarly research featuring David Parry. He is an Assistant Professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas and his main point was that scholars have an obligation to publish their research in journals that make free copies available online.

This is a topic that I am interested in and I agree with Parry. This is also a hot and debatable topic tight now. Unfortunately, it was the suicide of Aaron Swartz after he was being prosecuted for trying to free such research that brought it to many mainstream news outlets.

"Information is power," Swartz wrote. "But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves."  He had made unauthorized downloads of more than four million articles from JSTOR and the federal indictment against him said that he did it in order to then upload them to the Internet and make them available for free.

His approach was radical and was compared on news outlets to Wikleaks. The tragedy in his case was that even though the civil complaints against him were dropped and he had returned all the downloaded data, the case was still being pursued.

David Parry calls sites like JSTOR "knowledge cartels."

The term "open" and open access (OA) has a number of meanings. According to Wikipedia (itself an open site), open access can be defined as "the practice of providing unrestricted access via the Internet to peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. There are a growing number of theses, scholarly monographs, articles and book chapters that are provided with open access to all.

There are two degrees of open access: gratis OA meaning no-cost online access, and libre OA which is like gratis but with some additional usage rights.

Similarly, we use the term "open content" with materials available online where the author(s) gives the right to modify the work and reuse it.  Most of us went through school learning to use content intact and to associate it with an author(s).

You might be familiar with Creative Commons licenses that can be used to make content accessible and yet to specify usage rights (such as attribution or non-commercial usage). This blog uses a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license for the content.

The open access concept was pushed forward at a rapid pace by the Internet, and in education it was pushed by its extension into learning objects and other resources used in online learning.

Scholarly publishing, much like the music and film industry and traditional publishing, has resisted open access, and may very well find that resistance to be why it will disappear.

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You can listen to the Tech Therapy podcast on The Chronicle site or subscribe to it with iTunes.

A lot of people now think the only providers of MOOCs are Cours­era, EdX or Udac­ity, but there are many other providers of these sometime Massive, sometimes Open online courses.

I would consider some of the providers below to not be offering MOOCs by a strict definition. Some only offer open course materials. An example are the courses offered through Apple iTunes U. Massachusetts Institute of Technology in iTunes offers dozens of free online courses, mostly in science and technology. But their iTunes U site only gives you access to downloadable lectures and materials - not a course experience with a teacher and interaction/discussion. You can also download MIT course materials directly from the MIT open courseware website if you want to have a go at the materials "on-your-own."

Most MOOCs from universities offered prior to 2012 were available from the university's own website, but in the past year, more universities are using platforms such as Coursera to host and handle registration.

1. Open Yale courses.


2. Carnegie Mellon University - Open Learning Initiative


3. Class Central - aggregates Stanford, Coursera, MIT and Harvard led edX (MITx + Harvardx + BerkeleyX), and Udacity courses


4. Coursera


5. Curricki


6. EdX


7. Udacity


8. Canvas Network - free courses from Instructure using their Canvas LMS


9. Udemy


10. Open Learning


11. Open Learn - Open University (UK)


12. P2PU


13. SyMynd courses from NYU, University of Washington and McGill University


14. Stanford's Free Online Courses


15. University of the People


16. WikiEducator


17. Wikiversity


18. Blackboard's CourseSites