Moo(c) Mystery

Where did my Mooc go?

Ace reporter Betsy de R. wanted to hone her digital skills before the August reunion so that she could offer the Burgerons and even Nana Lou valuable teaching tips on running open courses on the web. The Burgerons have been posting their stories, photos, songs and creations on a public website for some time now to help them get to know each other better and to share their many talents with each other.

Betsy de R. signed up for one of those new fangled Moocs. Heck, it was free! The Mooc was supposed to be about how to teach on the open web; it was only going to be 4 weeks long; she could work on the course in her evening hours at the little cottage she rented in Bovine which came equipped with wi-fi. Betsy de R. was a pretty busy lady covering all the news that was fit to print in Bovine County while also investigating some County mysteries, so the asynchronous course format really fit her schedule.

She was not prepared for the Moo(c) mystery, however. The first week of the Mooc ran smoothly enough: videos, resources, discussion forums-nothing unusual. There were a few cryptic messages throughout the discussion forums posted by “Anonymous”. She found the postings a little strange, but chalked them up to a few trolls in the system.

After a hard day’s digging around Area 106 with Aunt Sappy, Betsy de R. dragged herself back to her cottage after grabbing a burger and a shake at Bovine’s Burgers and resigned herself to putting in another few hours on her course. She logged in. ‘Whoops, what’s this?’ she thought as she stared at a blank course page. No videos, no forums, no resources….nothing! No explanation for all course content deletion. No instructor, either. “Where is everybody?” “Technical difficulties?”

Same scenario the next day and the next. Betsy de R. looked up the You Tube  video ‘What is a Mooc?’ to try and figure out what had happened.

Once she found out that the information in a Mooc could be distributed across the web and may not necessarily be contained in a course, she realized that she would have to network with some students she had met in the Mooc and find them on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. She hoped she could continue her learning with her new network before the August reunion.

Betsy de R. was a pretty smart cookie and decided that the Mooc should be renamed Moo because the networks were many (potentially massive), they were in the open and online but really not a course at all. She decided to ok the new name with Anna Cow.

 

Credits: Written by Sappho (@janweb3)

‘What is a MOOC?’ video by Dave Cormier

Gif originates from Luis Bunuel’s ‘Un Chien Andalou’