Monica Bulger, Cristobal Cobo and I have a new paper out in Information, Communication and Society where we investigate real world meetings organised by MOOC users. These meetings are sort of contradictory as of course one of the advantages of MOOCs is that they are online and can be accessed anywhere without the need to travel; yet lots of users are kind of building in this face to face component themselves, all over the world (see the map). We asked whether this was because they felt they were missing something from the MOOC experience (and were therefore sort of recreating classrooms) or whether it was more of an excuse to network and socialise (hence recreating the after school social experience). We find evidence for both motivations though the former is stronger.
These meetings show important potential to fix one of the strongest criticisms of MOOCs, which is that they are only for the really self-motivated and that many people drop out: by creating local learning communities, perhaps motivation can increase. Yet this also cuts against the idea of global learning: it was clear, for obvious reasons, that most meetings take place in big cities in the developed world. Those in urban areas or developing countries simply have less people to meet with.
