The long awaited Department for Business Innovation &Skills research paper on “The Maturing of the MOOC” was published today and quotes the Cetis paper “MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education” by Li Yuan and Stephen Powell. The BIS paper by Stephen Haggard provides a wide ranging assessment of the state of MOOC developments internationally and in the UK. Haggard reviews the literature and commentary on MOOCs from a broad range of sources assessing the arguments for and against Massive Open Online Courses, learner behaviour and feedback as well as business and financial models.

The BIS paper finds Li and Stephen’s explanation of the distinction between cMOOCs and xMOOCs particularly useful:

“cMOOCs emphasise connected, collaborative learning and the courses are built around a group of like-minded individuals’ platform to explore new pedagogies beyond traditional classroom settings and, as such, tend to exist on the radical fringe of HE. On the other hand, the instructional model (x
MOOCs) is essentially an extension of the pedagogical models practised within the institutions themselves, which is arguably dominated by the “drill and grill” instructional methods with video presentations, short quizzes and testing”.

The full BIS paper “The maturing of the MOOC” is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/240193/13-1173-maturing-of-the-mooc.pdf
The Cetis white paper: “MOOCs and Open Education: Implications for Higher Education” is available from our publications site: http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/667