FROM MMORPG TO MOOC: "Minecraft has become a kind of anarchic massive open online course (MOOC) all on its own." That's one major conclusion from Scott Smith in this Quartz feature titled, Could Minecraft be the next great engineering school? Drawing examples from Minecraft resources including MincraftEdu and events such as MineCon, Smith wonders if the eight-bit maker hit and similar serious games can become the "new on-ramp to a technical education." He points out that a YouTube search on "Minecraft" returns 7.5 million results. We did our own search for 'minecraft tutorial' and received 1.63 million results. By comparison AutoCAD and Google Sketchup, two well-respected, and non-gamified design tools, only returned 140K hits combined. Looks like Smith's MOOC prediction is already well underway.
