This is an investigative post to enquire from the community's thoughts on weather Moodle is capable of supporting a Massive Open Online Course / MOOC? I ask because I fear if it doesn't then it emits some warning signals. The reason for this is primarily two-fold:
- If Moodle isn't capable of running a MOOC, what is?
- If we have something for running MOOCs, should/can we bring our more traditional/blended stuff in too?
Is Moodle capable of running a MOOC?
I've not seen much evidence to suggest it is already - which is OK, in fact it gives me motivating ideas to start something. I see little reason why it couldn't. We may be waiting on MITx's open source download link for some time, only to find it's totally unfit for any other institution's requirements. Sakai may be better, but it’s not likely, after all a VLE is a VLE (most of the time). What separates Moodle from the rest is its community, in usage and development. Moodle seems eminently capable of running a MOOC, it's got the social constructivist roots but it also needs some development direction to get there and fully support the constructs of the connectivism pedagogical model. One outcome of posting this message is to garner other's views of weather Moodle can/should head in this direction.
So, in a way, I was hoping to keep this simple, to hear other's thoughts on Moodle as a MOOC platform. Maybe it could work for a handful of courses, but would it scale up? If a department in my university wanted to open up and fly free, would they use the institutional Moodle service? Maybe Coursesites or TEDEd are more attractive, or distributed among many online environments, or something custom and bespoke?
My view is that Moodle needs work to satisfy wholly learner-driven, MOOC-style open learning, it's got a lot of potential but it's not been on the roadmap, so it's not quite catered for at this stage. Moodle 2 brings a platform for so much potential, but what direction does it head in?
I'll stop here, but your thoughts, views or ideas on this would be most welcome, as I have not the answer, just the curiosity and my opinions.