An Across-Institution Anytime MOOC in Database

In Spring 2015, instructors at participating universities and colleges plan to run their Introduction to Database courses using Jennifer Widom's self-paced online course as an optional or required resource. We call the collective of students and instructors who will be moving through Widom's course in relative synchrony, a (loosely) collaborative, distributed open, online course (CDOOC). This way of exploiting a self-paced course allows an organized cohort (e.g., a campus course) to move through at the cohort's "own" pace. If the organized cohort's progress through the self-paced course is open to other learners, outside the a priori organized cohort (as it will be in our case), then this larger population amounts to a MOOC. Because such a MOOC can be convened at anytime, by any instructor, we call it an anytime MOOC.