MOOC or xMOOC?

I’ve been internally debating the use of the term xMOOC to describe the Coursera/Udacity/edX offerings for a while now.  This first came about when I started to study neoliberalism, and realize that there was not a true north definition; it was a term that fit the needs of the author, and usually in a way that cast scorn and dispersions on those umbrellaed via it.  This is not to say that neoliberalism is not an important concept, but that the concept and the term are not necessarily synonymous.

I talked about something similar with MOOCs in a recent post, noting how MOOC can mean anything to anyone, and inasmuch the term loses any meaning (and I note that the term is so bereft of its original meaning that it didn’t have meaning to begin with, thus it is a simulacrum).  There is an opposing force to such an argument, and it is based around the original iteration of the MOOC, the 2008 connectivism version that academics today label a cMOOC.