After three centuries of technological innovations adapted to distance learning, digital media is now offering new possibilities for virtual, teaching and learning experiences. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are not only modifying e-learning on the web, but also affecting the traditional model of higher education.
Mainly disseminated by American for-profit start-ups, such as Udacity and Coursera, MOOCs are free and available for anyone interested in learning. Initiatives are attracting literally thousands of enrollments worldwide, which represent a new and diverse audience for institutions. Technology has always been an ally for distance learning, allowing students to pursue certificates and even degrees without formally going to a physical classroom. Even before broadcast mass media started to be used for education in many countries, universities already reached students who could not attend lectures by mail. With the arrival of digital tools and collaborative Web 2.0 resources, e-learning encountered new possibilities for sharing knowledge and content production.For instance, blogs, social media, and websites such as Wikipedia offered platforms for anyone to host, edit, and publish academic material online.
Considering this scenario, in 2005 educator George Siemens proposed a new theory for learning within networks: connectivity. He explained that as the Internet facilitates content creation and propagation, students could use digital communities to learn socially and continuously. The first course to be developed under the MOOC acronym was a tentative effort to explain connectivism and put it into practice. It was launched in 2008, but some of its core ideas and pedagogues differ from most options offered by major platforms: Coursera, Udacity and edX. By exploring new media, MOOCs emerged as a popular choice for learners. Most courses claim that no prerequisites are required and introduce students to undergraduate disciplines from different fields of knowledge.
Sources may vary: there are options from Harvard, Stanford, MIT and many more prestigious institutions, most of them located in United States and Europe. The interest in MOOCs, however, not only comes from student body. Teachers and institutions see in open courses the potential to reach a diverse audience and sources of relevant databases about students’behaviors within the learning platform (Koller, Simonite and Stacey). In this sense, professors and e-learning specialists may also use MOOCs’ technologies to test their teaching strategies and pedagogies of distance learning, not only in virtual classes but also traditional ones.
Considering the emergence of MOOCs and the context of new media for purpose of innovative pedagogies, this thesis aims to answer the main research question: to what extent are new media technologies creating learning practices online and impacting the traditional model of higher education? By applying characteristics of new media in online courses, one also may ask the following questions concerning teaching, learning, and applications of the theory of connectivism in MOOCs: what kind of interface do open online courses have? Which new media features are being used on MOOCs to transmit knowledge and create assignments? What is the role of students and professors in a MOOC? To what extent are courses applying the theory of connectivism on their strategies? Could connectivism improve new practices of e-learning?Because MOOCs are part of a recent phenomenon 1 , there are not many academic studies concluded yet that could offer models of new learning practices, neither their relation with new media pedagogies, nor a theoretical explanation for possible disruptions.
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