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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) came into the educational ecosystem attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. The original courses were completely open and free, targeting the worldwide population. However, current MOOC providers have pivoted towards more private directions, and we often find that MOOC materials are completely closed within their hosting platforms and cannot be retrieved from them by their learners. This diminishes the potential of MOOCs by making content available to a small proportion of learners and severely limits the reusability of the educational resources. In this paper, we present a process that we call 'unMOOCing', in which we transform the resources of a MOOC into OERs. We taught a MOOC on Open Education in the UNED Abierta platform, and we 'unMOOCed' all of its educational resources, making them available to download by the learners that are taking the course. The results of the unMOOCing were very encouraging: the possibility of downloading the course resources was the most highly rated component of the course. Additionally, the two unMOOCed materials that were considered as most useful (presentations and contents in a PDF) were downloaded by 90% of the learners. Now that the majority of MOOC providers are moving towards a more closed educational approach, we believe that this paper sends a powerful message for bringing back the original MOOC concept of 'Openness' with the unMOOCing process, thus contributing to the wider dissemination and democratization of education across the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the use of and research about the effectiveness of Massive Open Online courses (MOOCs). Topics discussed include analysis of student clicks correlated with academic success to evaluate the instructional value of MOOCs, the lack of information and assessment data on student learning, and experimental designs of MOOC courses such as "A/B tests" and plug-in experiments.

New social technologies offer new opportunities for creating online communities of praxis in the preparation of preservice teachers. In this design research study, 22 preservice teachers in a social studies methods class conducted online class discussions inside the National Council of the Social Studies Network Ning, a social network for social studies educators. These preservice teachers engaged in series of reflective dialogues blending theory and practice the hallmark of praxis with their classmates, with other preservice teachers from around the country, and with practicing social studies educators from around the world. They also expressed a strong intent to engage in professional learning networks and communities of praxis in the future, although the Ning was ancillary to these intentions. These findings both hold promise and offer crucial guidance for other teacher educators. When implemented with attention and intention, online social networks provide promising opportunities for students in teacher education programs to engage in networked communities of praxis that can provide opportunities for colearning throughout a teacher's career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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