INIFTA   05425
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES FISICO-QUIMICAS TEORICAS Y APLICADAS
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
MOOCs and the AI-Stanford like Courses: two successful and distinct course formats for massive open online courses.
Autor/es:
C. O. RODRIGUEZ
Revista:
EURODL
Editorial:
EDEN
Referencias:
Año: 2011
ISSN:
1642-1027
Resumen:
Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an experiment by the Stanford computer science department to extend technology knowledge and skills to the entire world. The instructors were two of the best known experts in the subject of artificial intelligence. Although students would not get Stanford University grades or credit, 20,000 from 190 countries finished the course successfully receiving a “statement of accomplishment” from the tutors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Udacity is a startup from the authors of CS221 delivering similar massive free online courses.Massive open online courses known as MOOCs on the other hand have been delivered since 2008. They are based on the explicit principles of connectivism (autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity) and on the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward the resources and learning.In the research literature, newspaper and magazine articles both types of OOCs, AI-Stanford like courses (AI) and MOOCs, have been identified in many occasions as equivalent.Distance education (DE) pedagogy can be classified through the evolution of three categories: cognitive-behaviorist, social constructivist, and connectivist. These three current and future generations of DE pedagogy have an important place in a well-rounded educational experience. To a large extent, the generations have evolved in tandem with the technologies and all three models are very much in existence today and are categorized by a set of conditions.In this paper we study in detail representative courses from AI and MOOC courses and establish that they share some common features but demonstrate clearly the very distinct course format and DE pedagogy associated to each type. We assign the AI to a cognitive-behaviorist (with some small contribution of social constructivist) and MOOCs to connectivist pedagogy.