MOOCs need to go back to their roots

Via OLDaily.

They were supposed to be educational communities, not hypertextbooks [...] Contrary to popular belief, MOOCs didn’t originate with Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig’s heralded 2011 class on artificial intelligence, which developed into the startup Udacity. Rather, Stephen Downes and George Siemens, a pair of Canadian academics, developed the MOOC in 2008 as a proof of concept of their connectivist theory of education. Drawing from neuroscience and computer networking, connectivism postulates that knowledge is distributed across human and nonhuman nodes in a network. Downes and Siemens argue that in the 21st century, education is the ability to navigate this network, link disparate fields, and contribute to the understanding of other people.