Difficulty with defining your own research into MOOCs is not a lack of material you can find on the subject, it is how to wade through the avalanche of what others have already learnt, investigated and written about, from all possible perspectives. Finding your own unique view is even more difficult. I am interested in how MOOCs will affect and shape the learning experiences of people younger than the typical well educated, curious MOOCer making up the large majority of the current audience; will it really be the transforming experience for the young people between 16 and 24 who are only making their way through the secondary and higher education right now, while this change is happening. I am imagining the teens will look at it as a curiosity and try it if some of their friends talk about it or might be encouraged to test the waters by signing up for a MOOC offered by universities they are looking to apply to, in the discipline close to the degree pathway they are exploring…I could be entirely wrong, not sure if my perspective is more or less skewed if I read up more on the subject or less. So far, I am really fired up by the connectivist movement; all my reading so far has in one way or another lead me there.
Post mortem data published from various completed MOOCs seems to indicate that knowing more about how people learn and adapting the materials and methods to accommodate more participants’ styles, appears to promise the speeding up of the transformation which seems to have been gathering pace even before MOOCs appeared. This is resting on decades of research on distance and online learning, technological advances, methods of delivery of materials and studies on learner characteristics and their motivation and engagement. What we do with it next and how we do it is important.