ABSTRACT
Learning is a social act. And yet for most students, their experience with a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is watching a video, taking multiple-choice tests or quizzes, and possibly reading forum posts, which can be anonymous. This experience is more interactive than reading a textbook, but far less interactive than working with one’s peers to create a shared understanding of knowledge. It does not allow for any kind of true collaboration or meaningful social connection around course content. What the technological design of most MOOCs has allowed us to do is to take the most boring and ineffective part of learning and put it online for students to complete in the most inhospitable environment for education—isolation.
