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The MOOC Model for Digital Practice responds to the “Building Digital Skills for Tomorrow” section of the consultation paper Improving Canada’s Digital Advantage: Strategies for Sustainable Prosperity by synthesizing the current state of knowledge about Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). It argues that building and sustaining prosperity through Canada’s current digital strengths depends on a digital ecosystem that embraces both infrastructure and the collaborative social networks enabled by that infrastructure. Prosperity in this context requires a citizenry with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to turn these factors towards creating wealth. By exploring the relationship of MOOCs to the digital economy in general and their potential roles to prepare citizens for participation in that digital economy in particular, it illustrates one particularly Canadian model of how these needs may be addressed.

In keeping with the multimodality and the alternatives to “traditional” modes of presentation enabled by digital technologies and integral to the development of the digital economy, our knowledge synthesis has supplemented the printed report with four online digital videos. Each synopsizes one main attribute of the relationship of MOOCs to the digital economy: