DESCRIPTION OF CONTENTS
The article begins with an explanation of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) and the distinction between cMOOC (in which learning is built by the learners) and xMOOC (a more traditional “transmissive” way of learning).
MOOC, despite their great potential for learning, cannot guarantee quality, depth, transfer … the media cannot provide de facto added value to learning.
The relationship between teaching and learning is not linear but systemic.
Through a plan built “around resources”, a plan made up of tools but also of significant activities and constructive interactivities, through students and teachers training (all of them learners), the added value of technologies will appear.
What long-term vision and what explicit place for digital tools in students and teachers’ training? Because many of those human factors have not been taken into account, many initiatives to equip and put schools into network have failed.
He observes that current “platforms with MOOC” offer tools that existed almost ten years ago in platforms that have become classic (Moodle, Claroline, Spiral, Dokeos …): resources, exercises, submitted works, some forums …
The attributes of the ideal platform with on the one hand a personal environment, virtual class and on the other hand MOOCs resources or library,
• between on the one hand a personal and collective assimilation and on the other hand a transmission of “stabilised” knowledge,
• between activity spaces and “automated” courses,
• between informal and formal learning, between setting roots in the town/region and opening on the world,
• between the worlds of initial and lifelong learning,
• between training project at school and social innovation or corporate project,
• between the necessary administrative enrolment and world citizenship …
• between “think global” and “act local” …
REVIEWER’S COMMENTS ON THE PUBLICATION
Marcel Lebrun is an educational technologies teacher and pedagogical counsellor at the Catholic University of Louvain. He helps teachers setting up educational technologies. He is behind the Belgian learning management system “Claroline”. He has written several books on the relation between technologies and learning.
He is an international reference who will help INFOREF create new interactive sequences (MOOC, Moodle...) in chemistry during the third year of the project.
In this article, he addresses the current enthusiasm for “Massive Open Online Courses”, comparing it to previous educational technologies.
MOOC are a real Big Bang in the educational world
Technologies set us free (from our transmission duty) but it condemns us to become intelligent, to find a new role of learning guide, to give a new meaning to spaces, to find and set up fertile activities and interactivities for learning in those campuses now threatened with extinction… and again it is a question of teacher training.
Digital technology, learning in the digital era, are not just a matter of tools and resources, not even just a matter of methods and uses, it is mostly a matter of mentality, of state of mind and of culture.
