MOOCs and pedagogy: where are we heading?

Abstract

MOOCs are often considered as a technology and many realize, today, that they do not follow the well know Gartner hype cycle. In the US they have almost completely disappeared from the Gartner curve although they are still very high in Europe. But MOOCs are not a technology: they are a new means to acquire knowledge, using pedagogy, made available through technology, mainly the ones available through LMS and other social and collaborative tools. Thus they evolve not only through the available technologies but also much slower, at a human pace, through the slow movement of a changing pedagogy. Up to now the technology of each LMS has constrained the teacher to its underlying pedagogy. The new generation of LMS, introduced with the MOOCs, is using the latest advances of the technology: cloud and cooperative services instead of a bunch of services constrained in a single platform. This will allow to completely rethinking the LMS models as bouquets of services assembled by pedagogical designers. Various bouquets, fitting various approaches to pedagogy, may be made available according to the wishes of the users either teacher or students. MOOCs have shown that the underlying technology permits to consider the generalization of flipped learning for large numbers of students. This will completely change the approach towards the new generation of the virtual environments in the universities towards a more user–centric approach. Instead of the institution the entry point will be the student him/herself. The new technologies, beneath the MOOCs, permit to acquire huge amounts of data about student’s activity. It induces a move towards their analysis and building alerts to inform in real time both the students and their tutors of possible difficulties. This will completely transform the methods to follow the students and probably also to deliver the grades. Some people have said that MOOCs are the end of the university. They are wrong: they are a chance to better fulfill its responsibilities. MOOCs are the match, which is igniting the light towards a better learning.