commercialisation and pedagogy of MOOCs. The next chapter will examine the second issue, that of narrative, in detail.
MOOC Background
MOOCs are a topic where a number of people can lay claim to being the instigator. What counts as a MOOC is open to interpretation. People had released content previously, either as part of the OER movement or independently, and this could be in the form of a whole course. However, there was a coalescence of interest around running open courses from a number of people associated with the open education movement. David Wiley ran a campus based course in 2007 and made it open to anyone online to participate, as did Alec Couros, operating an 'open boundary' course. However, the title of founder is often given to Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08), run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, in 2008. It was commentary on this course that gave rise to the term MOOC, jointly attributed to Dave Cormier and Bryan Alexander.
There are familiar names in this list of early MOOC providers because MOOCs can be seen as a logical extension of the open education movement. What characterised these early MOOCs was an interest in the possibilities that being open and networked offered. The subject matter of these early courses was related to the mode of presentation, so courses were in topics such as open education, digital identity or networked pedagogy. As with early elearning courses, which would often be about the subject of elearning itself, these early stages of experimentation focused on subjects where the medium was the message. But as with elearning, this soon broadened out to encompass all topics.
