Grab a MOOC by the Horns

By now you have likely heard the term MOOC. Maybe it conjured up a wild beast romping through the wilderness, horns at the ready. A MOOC isn't a breathing animal, but it is barreling through the field of education with noticeable force.

A MOOC, or Massive Open Online Course, is typically a free or nearly free course provided online to large numbers of students at the same time. The first MOOC was launched in 2008 by the University of Manitoba with more than 2,000 students enrolled. This MOOC, called Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, was a student-centered course that was heavily dependent on students learning from one another. In 2011, Stanford University launched the first truly large-scale MOOC with 160,000 students learning about artificial intelligence through video lectures and interactive discussion forums.