This is connected learning: the connection between ideas and the materialization of things, between people collaborating to learn and do and make things together, between mind and machine, curiosity and capacity, anywhere and anytime learning and effecting, between the world as it is and our ideals of edification and equity that we deem crucially important to institutionalize.

The early evidence is that MOOCs can deliver the numbers. In the end, they will not be judged simply on this quantitative mandate. Rather, they will be assessed, like any learning modalities, by their ability to draw on the best of social media and peer-to-peer engagement to cultivate these virtues of theory and practice, to comprehend and to create, to expand the reach of access, insight, and validated knowledge. For it is such cultivation that makes learning what it is and why it is worthwhile. If MOOCs can’t deliver on the promise and possibility they will be nothing more than the next fly by night. It is more hopeful and helpful to see them as a hybrid form, as a bridge between conventional institutionalized and post-institutionalized learning. Their institutional and social promise will depend both on the underlying structural support and on the quality of their destination. Ultimately their success or failure will turn on whether they can help substantially to move us collectively and collaboratively along the road to delivering on these potentialities of connected learning.

via MOOCmania | DMLcentral.