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If you have any free time this week, I strongly recommend that you follow MOOCMOOC. What is MOOCMOOC? Aside from being fun to say, it’s a Massively Online Open Course (MOOC) about Massively Online Open Courses (a MOOC about MOOCs). You can enroll or learn more about MOOCMOOC on its website.

In honour of MOOCMOOC, this edition of links of the week will be devoted to links about Massively Online Open Courses and the future of education. I personally find this format of learning fascinating. When the Middle Ages were my primary academic focus, I spent a lot of time examining how the development of the university influenced the intellectual climate of Western Europe.

In their nearly 1000-year lifespan the university hasn’t changed all that much. The format of a professor lecturing in front of his or her students has been a mostly consistant theme throughout the long history of the university. MOOCs have the potential to change this, creating collaborative, open courses that can be taken by thousands (or more) students at the same time.

MOOCs are neither inherently good, nor inherently bad. This mode of learn has as much potential to produce boring, lifeless education as it has to produce engaging, vibrant learning. Participates in MOOCMOOC will collaboratively examine this new mode of learning to assess how it can best be used to improve learning in the 21st Century.

If you’re interested in learning more about MOOCs, here are some links to get you started.

1. Masssively Online Open Courses are ‘Here to Stay’ – If you’re looking for a quick introduction to MOOCs, this links is a good place to start. It explains some of the terminology and lists major universities who are embracing this learning format.

2. Attrition and the Year of the MOOC – This blog post discusses the attrition rate of MOOCs (which can be as high as 97%). Since many MOOCs are entirely self-directed, it doesn’t surprise me that attrition rates are quite high. Personally speaking, when I took a MOOC introduction to computer sciences I dropped off about 1/3 into the class. Everyone leads a busy life, it’s easy to put MOOCs on the back-burner.

3. The Rhetoric of the MOOCs – This post examines the rhetoric of MOOCs and questions if the language used by MOOCs really reflects reality.

4. What’s the Matter with MOOCs? – This is a fantastic post which examines the difference between being informed and being education and questions if MOOCs have the capacity for true education.

5. moocmooc.com – If any of the above links have interested you, I strongly recommend that you participate in MOOCMOOC.

Well that wraps up another edition of links of the week. I’m certainly looking forward to participating in MOOCMOOC. It will likely be a slow week on the site since Beth and I are going on vacation. We’ll be road-tripping across Korea and camping along the coast. There’s a typhoon in the forecast so hopefully the weather isn’t too dreadful. We’ll also be recording a bunch of new ivrytwr videos exploring the many museums of Korea. Hopefully we’ll be able to make it to the teddybear museum where they reenact historical scenes using teddybears.

Thanks for reading, have a great week.