Perhaps the most celebrated of such experiments is a 2008 University of Manitoba course on learning theory team-taught by Steven Downes and George Siemens, whose 25 for-credit students were joined by 2,300 non-paying participants.  What resulted was an exciting proliferation of debate across diverse online venues, as well as a series of logistical problems: forums flooded with spam and other disruptive posts, an overwhelming amount of material of dubious quality, and privacy concerns. 

The MOOC grows from the Open Education movement, which has a strong presence at some of the nation’s top universities in pioneering programs like MIT’s OpenCourseWare, University of Michigan’s OpenMichigan, Berkeley’s own Webcast program, and Carnegie Mellon’s OpenLearningInitiative, which boasts: “No Instructors, No Credit, No Charge.” 

But MOOCs represent something more radical than the free distribution of course materials: a refiguring of the very site of learning and of the role of the instructor.  In the MOOC, the instructor both inspires and curates an outpouring of student-generated content. 

What emerges from the readers’ comments on the article is a lively discussion about education and pedagogy.  One commenter, Chedept, writes: “I'm all for opening up teaching--making it more accessible, relevant, transparent.  But there's a point at which it's no longer teaching, even if some learning is going on,” and asks:  “How is what is being done here different than, say, what any number of people or groups are doing with sites and blogs?” Wendy Drexler, a postdoctoral assistant at the University of Florida who took the Downes-Siemens course and will help lead a new MOOC about technology and learning, reformulates Chedept’s question: “At what point does content become a course?”  The answer, for the MOOC, may be at the point at which it ignites an explosion of interaction between students. It’s a powerful idea.