No Comments// Posted in MOOC by Nor Fadzleen Sa don on 08.16.14.

 

Does the word ‘MOOC’ rings a bell to you? If not, it’s never to late to know about the latest model for online learning content that is taking the world by storm.The emergence of Massive Open Online Courseware (MOOC) has garnered widespread attention for revolutionizing open access learning and it is considered as the main driver of education innovation. The acronym was coined by Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander in 2008 when Stephen Downes and George Siemens incepted Connectivism and Connective Knowledge course that propagates the learning theory of Connectivism. It is proposed as a learning theory for the digital age. So, it’s just another online learning fad that wouldn’t differ much from the previous LMS, no? Well, MOOC offers more than the existing LMS due to its scalability elements where more than several hundred to several thousand of students can join the course albeit not affiliate nor register to the respective educational institutions. Some of  famous MOOC providers are Coursera, Udacity, EdX, OpenLearning etc. and Zaid AlSagof had initiated a Listly post where he curated MOOC Development Platforms that are currently available. It is catalytic as it impersonalized learning participation, free of charge. Yep, it’s FOC, indicating that more learners would have access to high quality educational institutions that offer MOOC to the general masses.

In the Malaysian context, MOOC is steadily gaining traction amongst higher educational institutions where more universities are jumping into the bandwagon in creating their homegrown MOOCs. There is nationwide MOOC’s training for trainers’ (TOT) workshops that have been conducted with Malaysian universities to incept MOOC as part as tertiary education offered in our country. Taylor’s University is the 1st higher educational institution in Malaysia that conducted MOOC (Entrepeneurship) via OpenLearning. It was helmed by Professor Mushtak Al-Attabi and successfully gained 2581 participants. Universiti Putra Malaysia has launched PutraMOOC by using OpenLearning platform and Universiti Perguruan Sultan Idris has initiated Open4Learn. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia is also initiating MOOC, providing a flexible and lifelong education to the society. However, one question may cross our mind when it comes to MOOC implementation in Malaysia.

Is Malaysia ready for MOOC?

Apart from preparing for technological readiness, I personally feel there is a need to gauge the sociocultural readiness and suitability when it comes to MOOC in Malaysia. This is one of the main focuses in my research and hopefully I can share findings on the stakeholders’ views on the use of MOOC in tertiary education.

 

 

---

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.