Being a geek, I was excited to find a couple of articles recently which discuss aspects of the theory and technology underlying MOOCs. Unfortunately, since these didn’t focus on aspects of current efforts that I find fascinating, I didn’t think they were particularly engaging to read.

Here are some aspects of the current crop of online learning initiatives (e.g. Udacity, Coursera, edX) that I find interesting:

• High-quality, interactive content delivered with the help of an equally polished web user interface.
• Scaleable grading systems which work even with hundreds of thousands of students. This includes both automatic grading systems for objective questions and peer-based grading for open-ended questions.
• Collection of a lot of granular data on usage patterns, and plans to systematically analyze all this data to improve the learning experience.

The two articles I mentioned in the beginning make a big deal about how some earlier online learning efforts used traditional learning management systems (LMSs) to house content, and used blogging, social media and RSS to foster communication. They seem to imply that such efforts are “more open” and pedagogically favorable than the current crop, which implement their own content delivery platforms and provide a more centralized forum for student discussion.

I think this is missing the point.

The current crop of online learning initiatives implement their own content management and delivery systems for a lot of reasons. Firstly, because they can (it’s relatively straightforward to do so). Second, they can rapidly iterate on the user interface to improve the learning environment for students. (Good luck doing that with something like Sakai.) Finally, they need a system that can be carefully measured for future evolution of the project. It would be a nontrivial effort to retrofit this on an arbitrary LMS.

The reason they don’t provide RSS feeds for everything, allowing for students to arbitrarily compose classes from any source, is because they are emphasizing providing a high-quality (and thus controlled) learning environment. Syndication feeds work for static content. What about all the interactive content, and the specialized technology being built to handle this interactivity? I think an effort like edX needs to do some research before all this is easily distributable. (And they could very well do so in the future.)

Besides, is it really that much of a hassle for a student today to go to multiple sites to learn? Or to discuss it via social networks, instant messaging or their own blogs?