One thing that I think it missing in MOOCs is the academic relationships. MOOCs can scale the content, but while you’re in “class” there’s no way to raise your hand (and your teacher can’t tell if you’re getting the materials simply by scanning the room), you can’t walk over to office hours, and you can’t turn to the person next to you and whisper that you don’t understand. While we focus on scaling content, we also need to focus on scaling these meaningful educational relationships.

The company I work for, InstaEDU, is trying to do this for tutoring. Where we see the most potential for MOOCs is when they figure out how to scale the relationships needed to make online education really stick. It could be through a collaboration with a service like ours; it could be through the use of something like Google Hangouts… there are a lot of options. It will be super interesting to see where MOOCs end up once this initial buzz has worn off.

-Laura

I also really like the idea that you were thinking about college in Grade 7. I don’t think I even started thinking about high school until I was in Grade 8 and high school started in Grade 9 locally.

I think one of the challenges with the MOOC MOOC was the varying backgrounds of people. It seemed as if a number of participants (like yourself) already had extensive e-learning and MOOC experience. That I lacked that background added to my feeling of being out of place. I realize this might not be possible in these “massive” courses, but I think creating small subgroups of perhaps six or eight individuals, half of whom had previous MOOC experience and half who did not, and beginning the MOOC by having these small groups work together might have helped ease the transition.

Do you think cMOOCs could be really just several sections of the same course? Do you end up interacting with everyone or just a smaller group?