TWO DISTINCT COURSE FORMATS IN THE DELIVERY OF CONNECTIVIST MOOCS

Massive Open Online Courses based on the principles of connectivist educational
pedagogy known as connectivist MOOCs (c-MOOCs) have been carried out with great
success during the last years with hundreds of registered participants. Examples
are CCK08 (2008), PLENK2010 (2010), MobiMOOC (2011), EduMOOC (2011), Change11
(2011/12), and LAK12 (2012). Their implementation required conceptual changes in
perspective from both “facilitators” (tutors) and learners. They are so novel that much
research needs to be done for their understanding and improvement.
Basically two very distinct delivery formats have been used:
 Those that use what’s referred to as an aggregator, an emailed daily
newsletter, called “The Daily” that captures contributions from tutors
and participants mainly from their blogs: Format A.
 Those where all events go through a “centralizing” web page or wiki and
discussions happen with the use of a mailing list, in most cases using
Google Groups: Format B.
In this paper we study in detail representative courses. From their comparison we
establish that connectivist MOOCs delivered with formats A and B share many common
features but that their differences are such that the learner’s experience and the
outcome of the courses are very different depending on the format used.