Getting Ready: Synopsis

By Stephen Downes
Oct 04, 2021

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Connectivism is based on the idea that knowledge is essentially the set of connections in a network, and that learning therefore is the process of creating and shaping those networks.

A connectivist course is focused on developing two types of knowledge: personal knowledge, your own network of ideas and beliefs, which is shaped by activities and experiences; and social knowledge, which is the public network of people and institutions, which is shaped by communication and interaction.

The MOOC environment is designed to support both types of learning. There isn't a single classroom or learning management system; instead the course itself is design to create connections between individual websites or blogs and to create a flow of conversation and cooperation across that network. Ideally, course participants will have tools to manage their individual knowledge networks as well as means to interact through social networks.

Course content consists of digital media created by and shared among the participants. The role of the instructors is to seed the course with web-based resources (such as this page), references and background reading, presentations bout some of the core course contents, tasks and activities, and audio or video discussions with guests or course participants.

To add to this, and to create a course that is reflective of the community as a whole, participants are expected to add their own contributions, and to share them openly with each other, and through this practice build their own knowledge and learning communities.

The objective of the course isn't to present some body of content to be learned or remembered by participants. Each person enters the course with their own learning objective.

In a massive open online course there will be more content than any individual can read or view, let alone remember, and as a result, the experience of each person in the course is unique, and the interactions are driven by each person's individual perspective on the material.

The learning in a connectivist course is emergent; it is not defined and transferred or transmitted; rather it is created through the process of individual experiences and interactions. It is something new, different for each person in the course, and in a broader, more social sense, an outcome of the course as a whole.

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