Connectivist learning environments : Massive open online courses

For most of human history, knowledge had a long and stable shelf-life. With the ubiquity of advanced computing, information, and the knowledge it generates, has a much sorter half-life, often measured in months rather than generations. Educators are hard-pressed to meet the knowledge demands of students, who are no longer content to engage with traditional learning pedagogies. Not only must content delivery options evolve, so to must the learning paradigms. A connectivist learning pedagogy was proposed as a means to address the effect of technology on learning environments by placing the emphasis on the studentinformation relationship rather than the student-teacher relationship. Concurrently, the introduction of massive open online courses, in which very large numbers of online students participate in the same course at the same time, offers an interesting test to the connectivist pedagogy, in which the learning context, bolstered by technology, is given greater prominence.

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