Who would have imagined it possible to learn Artificial Intelligence algorithms from a great teacher, for free, from home before 2012? I didn’t. Yet Massive Open online Courses (MOOCs) made this possible: Coursera [1], founded in 2012, offered as one of its early courses the eleven weeks Machine Learning [2] course from Andrew Ng [3], Stanford Professor and Coursera founder.

Andrew Ng, Coursera co-founder

I recently did the course and thought it was a mind-blowing experience. What I further appreciated is that this technical understanding of neural networks, which replicates learning mechanisms of our own neuron-built brain, helped me understand better an edX philosophy course from MITx, as well as Professors Cope & Kalantzis other Coursera course: Learning, Knowledge and Human Development.

For the analysis of these MOOC courses, I will use the framework used in the course:

• Architectonic: online course with pages with videos and text, discussion forums, quiz pages and posting of essays. This happens within an open space that includes a personal view for each student with their progression.
• Discursive: apart from the videos and additional resources, the exchanges are essentially written-based via forum message posts and essays.
• Intersubjective: there is a combination of teacher-to-student information flow (videos) with more interactive flows: student-to-student lateral flows in the context of written discussion forums, as well as, in some cases, of student-to-teacher interaction using essays and feedbacks.
• Social-cultural: MOOC enable a wide social diversity as the students often come from various continents and cultures. The forum inputs reflect this diversity.
• Proprietary: the space is owned by the course creators, but in effect also co-owned by the learners. Indeed, in courses such as this one, it is the learners who make the course live: we are the only ones actually strolling the pages and interacting one with another.
• Epistemological: MOOCs encourage the use of media from links to archives of past books, up to recent TED talks and other online videos openly available on YouTube.
• Pedagogical: the base of the pedagogy is rather passive transmission-based with the videos, but the spirit becomes more active as learners are given additional resources to explore. Writing the essays implies further exploration in various directions. I surprised myself browsing about Karl Marx and his alternative views of education.
• Moral: MOOC push for lifelong learning and promote the development of citizens actively contributing to the world, empowered by a free, wide choice of learning.

Main critiques about MOOC is the lack of direct, dynamic interaction as all goes through written exchanges in forums. MOOCs remain, in the core learning, quite didactic at each course level. Learners can however mitigate this by building analogies with other courses, which helps build 360 and deeper views of subjects. Finally, online courses can be quite complex, as I recently experienced in my previous course: I am still trying to overcome what appears to be a glitch in order to finalize the course!

Overall, the new boundaries opened by MOOCs can be considered as transformative, compared to the traditional university courses, often more classroom-style and restricted to a small category of citizens.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coursera

[2] https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Ng