Stephen Downes’ MOOC about distributed learning, E-Learning 3.0, had a pre-start last week – which I missed, but I watched the recording.
It seems Stephen was a bit disappointed – only a few people turned up for the first live-video, maybe this was just because many thought the course would start on October 15.
Or maybe there are more fundamental reasons. When Stephen en George Siemens facilitated a very first MOOC in 2008, blogs and RSS-readers still were important tools. There was no competition from Coursera, edX, Udemy and other huge and heavily financed platforms. Marketing is all-important in online education these days (and in everything else).
Or is it? Maybe people really look for alternatives. Maybe it does not matter whether you attract 35 participants and not 100,000 – as long as the interaction is deep and creative. But then again I’d personally prefer a rich interaction attracting 100,000, and that huge group would split up into many smaller networks working on their own thing but being inspired by the global MOOC.
We’ll find out much more in the coming weeks.
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