What is a MOOC?

   MOOC is short for Massive Open Online Course. It is launched in 2008, and has a rapid development in 2012 which is called "The Year of The MOOC" by the New York Times (Bohle, 2013 Librarians and the Era of the MOOC). It aims to open a huge scale of online learning courses through direct presentation of information, interactive exploration of material and assessment . It is generally composed of xMOOC and cMOOC, and they respectively emphasize on connectivist philosophy, and traditional and well-financed courses( Siemens,2012,MOOCs are really a platform).Until today, MOOC is popular in America, but not all of the world, especially in some developing countries. It is mainly for free, but it still exists some for-profit courses.
    Refer to the cMOOC, there are four important principles which I think is important for explaining what is MOOC: aggregation, remixing, re-purposing, and feeding forward (Downes,2011,'Connectivism' and Connective Knowledge). Aggregation emphasizes that MOOC provides a online platform for collection of knowledge, opinions and information from different places and different people, and it doesn't have the limitation of time and spaces. Remixing here mainly means the content of the course on MOOC are both  within the course and out of the course, which make the content more abundant but also being questioned. Re-purposing emphasizes the content on MOOC need to meet individual's needs. The last one is feeding forward, and it highlights the sharing character of MOOC. 
    Based on the four disciplines and its operations in these years, MOOCs' benefits and also problems are talked a lot by some scholars and students. At first, it is convenient for students who have access to a MOOC learning on the Internet; second, MOOC is really rich in content, and it has a lot of opinions from students who may come from different cultures and backgrounds; third, you can use a lot of tools to assist your study on MOOC,like twitter and blog; fourth,you can break the limitation of time zone and physical boundaries; fifth, the content can be shared by all of peopple, and so on (Benefits and Challenges of a MOOC).Meanwhile, some arguments about MOOC still exist, for example,  a part of the content on MOOC is created by many students, the qualities are questioned；not all of the people have access to MOOC, it needs devices and digital literacy;MOOC can't provide a real face-to-face class for conversationS, so it reduceS the communication opportunities between teacher and students to some extent; at last, in this kind of informal classes, it needs people's self-control to learn well (Benefits and Challenges of a MOOC). 
    In my opinion, MOOC is a good way of learning, it definitely can help people get knowledge even degree, but it is hard to replace the traditional course. On the one hand, the acceptance of MOOC is relatively not high, not only because less people can use it, also because the informal courses weaken the value of the degree. In short, MOOC is really helpful and useful, but currently say, it mainly is a assistant way of study.
    Happily, I have registered Coursera for the course- The History and Character of Ancient China. I am so curious about Chinese history, and I hope I can find something different between Chinese course and American course on MOOC during study and interaction with our classmates in this semester.