Reclaiming the MOOC name

I have heard a lot of poo-pooing of MOOCs. A lot of “we-are-not-going-to-get-on-this-bandwagon” talk. A lot of “we don’t want no stinking MOOCs.”

I can only assume that what people are reacting to is the new breed of xMOOCs from the Courseras and Udacities (that’s funny, huh?) of the world. These are MOOCs that strive to serve hundreds of thousands of learners; that have weak facilitation, little peer interaction, and not much collaboration; that focus on analytics and big data and have business models that are troubling; that are often neither open, nor transparent.

But this isn’t what MOOCs are about to me. To me, they should be open, transparent, connected, and collaborative. That was the vision of the original idea of MOOCs, the cMOOCs as they are now called.

So when will we reclaim the MOOC name for this kind of collaboration that we value? Let’s not let the corporate MOOC armies take this term and co-opt it.