Transforming MOOCs and MOORFAPs into MOOLOs

At the launch of edX (see https://www.edx.org/), its president Anant Agarwal, announced that a “revolution is taking place in Boston and beyond, and that it is neither about tea nor the Boston Harbor—instead, it is about online education,” a revolution which he proclaimed was “going to change the face of education in the world” (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012). Agarwal is right: online education is growing rapidly, and challenging conventional educational practices through developments such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) (see Edutechnica, 2012) and the flipped classroom (see Gallagher & Garrett, 2013). See also, in this issue of the journal, Jon Baggaley’s reflections and prophetic insights on the development of MOOCs—“MOOC Rampant”) and Bobbie Seyedmonir’s review of Salman Khan’s book The One World School House: Education Reimagined, and her incisive and critical commentary on Khan’s visions of the flipped classroom in it. These revolutionary developments in online education are largely the consequence of the affordances of the Internet and the Web. However, while purporting to leverage off the power of these technologies, and improving educational practices, a common concern about these developments is that they are actually failing to make the most of the opportunities afforded by the Internet and the Web (see Milheim, 2013; Saba, 2013). The cause of this failing seems to be the inability of many of these purported revolutionary developments to learn from our past. Online education is not that much of a new development. Its origins can be traced back more than a couple of decades, and its fundamental principles many more decades through the broader practices of distance education and flexible learning (see Romiszowski, 2013). However, early iterations of online education (especially xMOOCs) set about to replicate conventional campus-based learning and teaching activities, namely places for educators to give lectures, and for students to listen to these lectures, and take quizzes and tests online (see Morrison, 2013). They failed to take advantage of the obvious affordances of the Internet and the Web such as network connectivity, and the opportunity for synchronous as well as asynchronous communication—quickly earning them the label MOORFAPs—massive open online repetitions of failed pedagogy (see also Prensky, 2013). But just as readers of this journal will be aware how early iterations of printbased correspondence education quickly morphed into much better resource-based distance education with which we are familiar today, I am confident, along with many others, that developments in online education will mature and improve with practice and experience (see also Cooper, 2013; Gallagher & Garrett, 2013). Furthermore, I believe there is every chance that proponents of MOOCs and the flipped classroom, in efforts to improve their practice, will quickly discover that