The lit-review (lit-review 2.0 as a dub it) has been going from a crawl to, a walk, to hopefully hitting speedwalking pace.  Lit-review 1.0 was last fall, which was a little too broad to be fit for purpose, and it really explored a lot of themes that might be worthwhile keeping in mind as things to discuss in the discussion portion of the dissertation  - you know, after I pass the proposal defense, and collect and analyze data - so it's not all that useful now.

...ambivalent?  I am not sure if ambivalence is the word I am going for because I am getting hints of nostalgia too.  Perhaps though I should take a step back, and start from the beginning.

This past weekend two things happened:

The first thing is that I've completed reading full books as part of my literature review for my dissertation, and I have moved onto academic articles, articles I've been collecting on MOOCs and collaboration in general. While MOOCs aren't really the main focus of my dissertation study, they do form the basis, or rather the campgrounds on which the collaborative activities occurred on, and it's those collaborative activities I want to examine. This review of MOOC articles (while still relatively in the early stages) made me reflect back on  my own MOOC experiences since 2011.

The second thing is that I received a message from FutureLearn which was a little jarring and made me ponder.  Here is a screenshot:



My usual process, when it comes to MOOCs these days, is to go through  the course listings of the usual suspects (coursera, edx, futurelearn) and sign-up for courses that seem interesting.  Then, as time permits I go through these courses.  I usually carve out an hour every other Friday to do some MOOCing these days since most of my "free" time is spent on dissertation-related pursuits.  It would not be an understatement to say that I have quite a few courses that are not completed yet (even though I registered for them about six months ago).  What can I say? I find a ton of things interesting.

If you're new to MOOCs you might say "well, it was a free course, and now it's going back into paid land - you should have done it while it was available". Perhaps you're right, perhaps not.  For a MOOC old-timer, like me (ha!), this type of message is really disheartening, and it really speaks quite well to the co-opting  and transmogrification of the MOOC term (and concept) and making something that is not really recognizable when compared to the original MOOCs of 2008-2012; or perhaps it's a bit even like an erasure - erasing it form the past, but luckily at least articles exist to prove that it existed, and cMOOC is still recognized as a concept.

I am convinced that platforms like coursera and futurelearn can no longer be considered MOOC platforms, and should be referred to  as either a learning management system (which they are), or online learning platform. Over the past few years things that seemed like a given for an open learning platform are starting to not be there.  First the 5Rs started being not applicable.  You couldn't always revise or remix materials that you found on these platforms...but you could download copies of the materials so that you could retain your own copy, and this meant that you could potentially reuse and redistribute.  Redistribution was the next freedom that went,  and after that was reuse.  You could still download materials though (at least on coursera and edx).  Then a coursera redesign made video download not an option... (still an option in edx, not sure if it was an option in futurelearn), and now courses are becoming time-gated... argh.

The certificate of completion was an interesting concept - a nice gift from the people who offered the course if you jumped through their hoops to do the course as they intended, but it was really only valuable when it was free of cost. This freebie has also been lost (not a great loss since it doesn't really mean much - at least not yet).

All of this closing off of designs and materials (closing in a variety of ways) makes me long for the days gone by, day not long ago, and MOOCs only about 10 years in the past.  Although, I suppose in EdTech terms 10 years might as well be centuries.

I do wonder when might be a good time to reclaim the name and offer up connectivist courses again - or perhaps it's time to kill the term (wonder what Dave thinks of this ;-) ), and create something that doesn't have such  commercial interests infused into it right now.

Thoughts?