fee-paying campus students. It took quite some imagining to see how this varied from the online courses that most universities had been running for the past decade, but rebranding it under the MOOC umbrella rendered it new. As we have already seen, Coursera similarly decided that campus based elearning might be an effective market for MOOCs, when they partnered with ten universities. As well as SPOCs we had Micro-MOOCs, which were 'short e-courses', DOCCs (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) and SOOCs (Social Online Open Course or Small Open Online Course).
Clayton Christensen seemed to come to the conclusion that totally online learning in K–12 was not going to arrive soon or that it might not be desirable, and a blended learning approach, which many schools had practiced for years, could be beneficial. Rather than view this as a sustaining technology or a failure of disruption, it was labelled 'hybrid pedagogy' and touted as 'a fundamentally new concept [in] the world of disruptive innovation' (Christensen, Horn and Staker 2013).
EdX declared that it was hard and expensive to create quality online courses, (Kolowich 2013d) and Sebastian Thrun attributed his Udacity pivot to the finding that retaining open entry learners is difficult (Chafkin 2013). In the Khan interview mentioned above, most pedagogic theories developed over the past 120 years are ignored and then attributed to Khan.
Henry Petroski (2012) suggests that society forgets fundamental lessons in bridge design every 30 years, because that is the average length of an engineering career. The same may be true with educational technology, except that it is a form of wilful amnesia. Educators have been designing large-scale distance courses, and then large-scale online courses, for over 40 years, and yet much of the MOOC movement has chosen to ignore this experience.
