The terms:
1. OER
2. MOOCS
3. Distance
4. Open learning
5. E learning
Are related but
separated by time. They had one common mission, to provide education remotely.
The teacher didn't have to be there physically. It meant that learning didn't
have to take place with four walls. The five terms or concepts are likely to be
revealed via citation analysis the new term that i have
learnt today-
OER- open education
resources is gaining a lot of currency with support from multinational
companies ie Hewlett Packard, Governments and state and private Universities.
Like Ubuntu, love for humanity. People have the philosophy that sharing is
caring, so we allow others to use our content and they can reuse, remix,
redistribute. MOOCS on the hand is an acronym that stands for Massive
Open Online Courses.
Distance learning has
been there for long, and even in Africa we had courses delivered by post inform
of paper, i think the London School of Hygiene runs a Masters Course in
Epidemiology, that is quiet expensive but popular in Kenya. I think in the
recent past they have it also in Moodle. Unisa runs a number of courses this
way too. Though if one looks at the term "Distance" it can apply to
even people taking a MOOC or eLearning. Open would imply that the course has no
restriction, you can access materials outside your designated learning
resources and you can study at your pace. Elearning, the use of electronic
devices to access learning management systems, they can be proprietary ie b
blackboard or open source ie Moodle.