Education and learning are terms used synonymously , i agree with Seymour Papert and the people who have been influenced over decades by his writings.

last few years i have been  seeing a lots of buzz around the word MOOC , just few years before the  term like  Elearning had a similar effect on us  . Initially all the entrepreneurial kinds tried to capitalize this rush using technologies in last two decade like Flash etc and everyone’s focus was on the content and selling this content in the digital formats in India too there has been efforts , they were basically digitizing all the textbooks and were calling it Elearning.

then came the craze of devices like OLPC in 2006 , i learned about it around 2007 , The idea was started will all good intentions but it had its own flaws in the model and approach  , you can learn about the current status of the project here . The two contributions i see from this projects are Netbooks , Tablets frenzy and Sugar Environment , which again are ideas which are way ahead of time , when people are still stuck on there Elearning mentality . all of a sudden the combo of hardware and software for a digitized classroom became so important as though the world is going to end tomorrow. Elearning companies popped up some of them made it through this gold rush too.

at this point i would like to differentiate between Education and Learning , The so called form has changed from television to computers and  now to internet . all that has been happening is so far in  education is sort of push in the education terms .

Enter MOOC’s Khan Academy , Coursera , Udacity , Edx , p2p , Udemy are some good examples of these here  again a wild rush to capitalize and transform the education sector into an open play ground . Traditional universities have all joined in  the race too .i feel because of over growing pressure to increase the base and  reduce the capital expenditure they feel , this is it the holy grail to fix education  .

There are two of MOOC’s  happening here one is a unstructured and the other is structured around to fit the traditional education  , the content is good , exams and tests are all conducted on a scheduled way in the structured form of delivery .

i did hacking around last year to make a clone of called Fossacademy, now i see  course-builder is based out of it too , i have looked p2p code base  , the good thing them is they have a way to give students exercies and measure there learning while they are enrolled to the courses , but the approach i like the most so far has been the Social  contructivism   and a good example of it find the Free and Open source culture way  and project like nand2tetris .

So what is happening to Education well its happening and places of learning have started to pop up too in the name of New Age schools , since we need to re look at the way our next generations are going to learn from things around them .