Massively Open Online Medicine

The new darling of the online educational community is Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The example which figures most prominently in the popular imagination is the Khan Academy, though its founder says otherwise, noting that MOOCs are merely online transplantations of traditional courses, while Khan Academy offers something different.

Others would take issue with his conclusion, or characterization. A “connectivist” MOOCis based on four principles:

• Aggregation. The whole point of a connectivist MOOC is to provide a starting point for a massive amount of content to be produced in different places online, which is later aggregated as a newsletter or a web page accessible to participants on a regular basis. This is in contrast to traditional courses, where the content is prepared ahead of time.
• Remixing, that is, associating materials created within the course with each other and with materials elsewhere.
• Re-purposing of aggregated and remixed materials to suit the goals of each participant.
• Feeding forward, sharing of re-purposed ideas and content with other participants and the rest of the world.