From a Community of Practice Perspective Learning in a MOOC Can Be a Lonely Process

The MirandaNet Fellowship, a community of practice founded in 1992, has been experimenting with online learning since the turn of the century. The Fellows, who know each other well, take different roles in an online conversation and weave their knowledge and experience together to create new collaborative knowledge that can be repurposed by members for the reports and articles they need to write in order to influence policy locally, nationally and even internationally; This could be called elearning in a Community Online Open Course (COOC). This growing body of MirandaNet theory and practice, called Braided Learning, has been challenged by the advent of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that can attract 45-50,000 participants who have no past history with each other. In this presentation we adjust our views about online learning because of our role as partners in developing and piloting the EU LLL HandsOn ICT MOOC that had 40 participants in the first pilot and more than 1,000 registrants for the second pilot. Using our experience of COOCs and MOOCs we discuss what kind of learning can take place in different kinds of web environment.