ABSTRACT
There has long been controversy over the value of using media and technology as things to “learn from” or to “learn with” (Jonassen & Reeves, 1996). The use of media and technology in ways that assume people will learn “from” them has always been much more prominent than efforts to use media and technology as cognitive tools “with” which people can learn (Kim & Reeves, 2007). For example, consider the massive open online courses (MOOCs) that have attracted enormous attention in the press and literally millions of enrollees (albeit with extremely high rates of attrition). The most predominant type of MOOCS, xMOOCs, are primarily populated with brief videos that learners are expected to learn from simply viewing them and multiple-choice quizzes to assess “learning” (Daniel, 2012). MOOCs wherein learners use cognitive tools to complete authentic tasks or solve real world problems for actual clients (sometimes called pMOOCs or project-based MOOCs) are quite rare (McAndrew, 2013; Reeves & Hedberg, 2014).
