Massive Open Online Course - pun on MMORPG
Virtual Learning medium?
Championed by Stephen Downes, George Siemens, and others of the Connectiv Ism clan.
May'2012: but has that wide/vague label been captured by bigger-but-more-traditional offerings like EdX?
some people have started distinguishing between cMOOC (CMooc) and xMOOC (XMooc)
z2008-07-01-ConnectivismMoocCourse
http://edtechtalk.com/node/3265
http://www.downes.ca/presentation/197
z2011-07-05-DownesWileyMoocDebate
http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/721/
George Siemens http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/03/05/moocs-for-the-win/
Apr'2012: Stephen Downes history: What makes the MOOC offered by George Siemens and myself different was that it was a distributed course. This is what enabled the 'massive' part of 'Massive Open Online Course'. The software developed to support the course - called G Rss Hopper, written by myself - was designed to enable the use of open educational resources (OER-s) and to aggregate student contributions written using their own WebLog environment (and later, Discussion Forum-s, TwittEr, FaceBook, Del Icio Us, and more). I've been working with Rss Aggregator-s since the beginning of RSS and of course have been influenced here by the work of people like Dave Winer and Aaron Swartz, among many others. We say explicitly that the content is the "McGuffin" - it is the thing that gets people together, gets them talking, gets them thinking in new ways (Connectiv Ism). With respect to actual Assess Ment and Credent Ial-ing, there are two basic approaches (or three, if you count badges (see the Mozilla BadGe program), but I don't really). The first is the BigData approach - instead of using a few dozen data points, which is what the testing regimen does, you track a student's activities and construct a profile from the full spectrum of his interactions with the material and other learners. This is the work of a field called 'Learning Analytics' (which should be 'discovered' by the Stanford-MIT nexus any time now). The second, which is my own approach, is a network clustering approach - the idea is that in a network of interactions in a community, expertise constitutes a 'cluster' of activity, and a person's learning can be assessed as a form of proximity to that cluster. The Learning Analytics and Network Analysis approaches are not mutually exclusive.
George Seimens http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/06/03/what-is-the-theory-that-underpins-our-moocs/