So today it’s just a scoop. I call it a „scoop“ as I got into curation by using scoop.it, a curation service on the web. When I started using it a few years ago, it was small and cozy. Today it is big, too big, but still a very intuitive service to store and share articles I read on the net and consider interesting. Curation is the most simple way to get into social learning and personal knowledge management. It’s actually seeking interesting sources, making sense of them by adding own insights and sharing it with your network. Some label curation as Knowledge Management 3.0, which I am currently writing about and will post to you soon.

But now for today:

Four years after the MOOCs craze began, where are we today? MOOCs provide a good example of our tendency to overestimate the significance of innovations in the short term whilst underestimating their long-term impact. The early predictions of a revolution in higher education proved false, and the idea that MOOCs could be the answer to the capacity problems of universities in the developing world was especially silly. Nevertheless, MOOCs are a significant phenomenon. Over 4,000 MOOCs are available worldwide and register 35 million learners at any given time. As they have multiplied they have diversified, so that, as this cartoon implies, the meaning of every word in the acronym MOOC is now negotiable.

I am also, however, a good illustration of why MOOCs have not sparked a revolution in higher learning. MOOCs are attractive to older people like me, who already have degrees and do not seek further qualifications, but who remain eager to acquire basic knowledge about an eclectic range of new topics. 

Read the whole article: MOOCs and higher education: evolution or revolution? | OUPblog
Link to Cartoon

Relatris‘ insight:

I couldn’t agree more. What John Daniel describes is exactly my own experience. I know people who did complete a MOOC (- I did several of them -), and they all were „older“, tech-savy and curios people with a degree, eager to learn new stuff but not willing (or able) to do a whole curriculum. There may be a range of reasons for that, but important for me is to keep MOOCs in mind as a tool for continued education of higher educated people with a tight agenda – if it wasn’t so costly and time-consuming to produce them…..