Another post about MOOCs that misses the point. The author, Ronald Legon, seems hopeful that 'MOOC 2.0' will arrive with better pedagogy, more support and better design. I have no doubt that what he describes will happen, at least in places, but it is certainly not worthy of the '2.0' moniker. It is simply an incremental natural evolution that adds efficiency and refinement to a weak model, but it's not a paradigm shift. 

The trouble is that Legon hasn't bothered to check the history of the genre. The xMOOCs under attack here are not far off the attempts by organizations and companies to replicate the same strategies that worked for old fashioned mass media in the 1990s. They were not so much 'Web 1.0' as a bastardization of what the Web was meant from the start to be. That is why those of us who had always been doing 'Web 2.0' stuff since the early nineties hate the term. Similarly, xMOOCs are a bastardization of what MOOCs started out to achieve and they miss the point entirely. What is the point? George Siemens explains this better than I could, so here is his take on the topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMfipxhT_Co

Happily, many people are using xMOOCs in a cMOOC-like way so they are succeeding in learning with one another despite weak pedagogies, unsuitable structures, and excessive length. While the intentions of the people that run them are quite different, many of the people using them to learn are doing so as part of a personal learning journey, in networks and learning communities with others, taking pieces that interest them from different MOOCs and mashing them up. They are in control, not the MOOC creators. Less than 10% completion rates are a worry to the people that run them, not to those that don't complete them (true, there may be some who are discouraged by the process, but I hope not).

MOOC 2.0, like Web 2.0, is likely to be what MOOC 1.0 (the real MOOC 1.0) tried to be - a cMOOC.  

I do see a glowing future for great content of the sort created for these xMOOCs (big information-heavy sites of the sort found in the 1990s have not ever gone away and continue to flourish) but they may have to adapt a little. I think that they will have to disaggregate the chunks and let go of the control. It is encouraging to see an increasing tendency to reduce their size to 4-week versions, but the whole notion of a fixed-length course is crazy. Sometimes, 4 weeks will do. Sometimes, 4 minutes would be better. Occasionally, 4 years might be the ideal length. Whatever they turn out to be, they must be seen as parts of an individually assembled whole, not as large-scale equivalents of traditional approaches to teaching that only exist due to physical constraints in the first place and that are sustained not only by continuing constraints of that nature but by a ludicrously clunky, counter-productive and unreliable accreditation process.