What MOOCs Can Do for the Traditional Online Classroom (Part II)
Note: An MS Word or PDF version of this can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/205135659/What-MOOCs-can-do-for-the-Traditional-Online-Classroom-Part-II
Introduction
2014 is upon us! We are now a
couple of years from the big MOOC “explosion” in the news, and since we’ve gone
to both extremes, too much optimism and too much pessimism, about what MOOCs
can and can’t do, it’s now time to have a more refined look at MOOCs and their
potential to cross-pollinate with, and positively influence the direction, and
practices, of traditional online courses.
As with the previous article in
this series, I’ll just refer to MOOCs in general. The reason for this is that MOOCs are experimental,
and we’ve seen a lot of experimenting over the lifespan of MOOCs these past six
years. These include cMOOCs, xMOOC, pMOOCs, sMOOCs, and other MOOCs that have
yet to be named. It’s now time to start
thinking about what can best be borrowed from MOOC practices into traditional
online learning. As with the previous
article, when thinking about this topic, there are three different areas:
materials, technology, and practices. In this article I’ll discuss blogging and
tweeting as technology and materials, easter eggs as practices, Open Communities, as practices supported by technology, and
collaborative research as a way to tie everything together.
Easter Eggs
I don’t see Easter Eggs often in
MOOCs, but I think it’s worthwhile to think about incorporating this feature
into courses. An Easter
Egg is a hidden message, a hidden joke, or some hidden treasure in a
game, software, or computer program - and apparently it’s also found in books
and crosswords, too! The Gamification MOOC, offered through the University of
Pennsylvania on Coursera, had an easter egg throughout the course. When the course instructor created his weekly
lectures his background trinkets changed. Those who were observant noticed that
the changes spelled out “ftw” (or “for the win” for those in the know). There
was a prize for the first person to decode this Easter Egg which was a free
copy of the professor’s book, also named For
The Win. Now, as an instructor or designer you don’t need need to break the
bank awarding prizes for your learners. If you tie in Easter Eggs into a badge
system you can have secret badges that learners don’t know about until they
unlock these. Badges can also be unique,
in that only one learner in a class of twenty can earn that badge in each
semester, thus giving the badge to the person who first discovered the hidden
feature. What could be an easter
egg?
A potential Easter Egg element
that you can incorporate could be around additional or supplemental
readings. Not every learner will go
through the supplemental readings, but they are there for a reason: you hope
that students will read, or view, or listen to what you have posted. What if
you put in a small piece of text in an article that directed learners to email
the professor with a keyword? Or, what if you tie into your LMS’s analytics to
see who was the first person to click and view a recording that went above and
beyond the class? Or, you can be like Dr. Werbach, in the gamification course,
and do something more covert, but also sustained throughout every week, to help
your learners pay closer attention to your presentations. Some learners will
care about these elements of gamification, but others will not. Just because
this does not necessarily appeal to all learners does not mean that you
shouldn’t try to increase engagement by using this approach. One thing to
remember is that some things will resonate more with some learners than others.
If a set of actions that result in the discovering of an Easter Egg in your
course is optional then there is no issue with having all learners partake in
an activity that doesn’t resonate with them. Furthermore, pairing Easter Eggs
with badges is one way of encouraging curiosity and exploration amongst your
learners.
Blogging, Tweeting & Distributed Learning
Again, blogging, tweeting and
distributed learning are not something that is new to MOOCs. Ever since the advent of Web 2.0 we’ve been
thinking about ways to incorporate these tools into our teaching in order to
increase the engagement in our classrooms.
One of the early examples of this was using twitter in a face-to-face
class to engage students in a large auditorium lecture (Smith, 2009, Elavsky et
al., 2011). One of the things done well in certain MOOCs is providing for
spaces outside of the classroom and the course discussion forum to demonstrate
not only an evolving understanding of the course materials, but also ways of
collaborating and communicating with others in the course. By using tools such
as gRSShopper, a tool used in CCK11 for example, or tools such as wordpress to
aggregate blog posts, tweets, and other content created by learners in their
own learning spaces back into the course, you are encouraging learners to take
a leap and start thinking about learning in spaces outside of the classroom. In
other words preparing for lifelong learning in Personal Learning Environments.
Another important aspect of this
is having the instructor be present in these environments as well. In thinking
of the Community of Inquiry model (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer,
2001), it’s important for the instructor not only to read and react to the
contributions of his class, but also to write publicly about the topics that
the course is tackling. Thus, the instructor isn’t confined to the regular
roles of sage on the stage, or guide on the side, but also takes on the
role of fellow passenger on the learning journey. After all, even if someone is
teaching the course, that does not mean that they know everything about every
single aspect of the course. Thus, their
exploration of the subject matter helps them as instructors, and helps their
learners reach for higher levels of mastery in the subject matter. I would
liken this to masters practicing their craft, and apprentices learning from it.
Open Community
Even if your course isn’t a
MOOC, there is something that you could take advantage of: a large scale
community of support! A good example of this is Alec Couros’ EC&I course.
You can either open the course up to non-credit participants, or you can invite
Network Mentors to help the learners in your course. Or, of course, you can do
both as Alec Couros does. Now, it should be noted that this doesn’t work for
all subjects, and some courses, as they are currently designed, don’t
necessarily scale-up very well. The Fundamentals of Online Education MOOC
(#foemooc) found this out the hard way (Kolowich, 2013). However, having
out-of-class mentors participate in the discussions, provide feedback toward
student’s projects, and provide current real-world examples to whatever is
covered in the course in any given week is a big benefit to the learners in the
course. The big question, then, becomes what’s in it for the mentors? It would seem like good, ol’ fashioned,
altruism, is not necessarily the norm these days.
One potential way to approach
this is to have introductory and advanced level students in one course. The
advanced students would have taken the course before, so that they would have
already been exposed to the introductory material. In addition to going over the material, and
getting a second chance at thinking about the content, and sharing that
know-how with the introductory students, these advanced students would have
access to materials that are only available to them. This could be thought of
in game terms as “level 2.” Thus, for
college credit purposes, an independent study course could be devised for the
handful of former students who act as mentors in the course in the future. A
letter of recommendation could be nice if the mentors do a good job; earning
badges for lifelong learning for skills such as supervised course facilitation
and mentoring; and for those PhD candidates, such practice might count toward
teacher preparation workshops that they might need to do. If you design your
course well, and take into account scalability issues, you might be able to
offer an open access course as well. Here learners get to learn not only from
the materials you provide, but from the diverse experiences of their fellow
peers.
Collaborative Research & Collaborative Writing
Finally, collaborative research
and collaborative writing can be something that you incorporate into your
course. Generally, this isn’t something I’ve seen built into MOOCs, but rather
it’s a happy by-product of massive open online collaborations that occur in a
MOOC. In MOOCs I’ve discovered individuals whose research interests follow or
complement my own, so we’ve had very successful post-MOOC research
collaborations. Two of these great
individuals are fellow co-authors such as Inge de Waard and Rebecca Hogue.
These types of collaborations are great because not only do you get to learn
more about a specific subject by collaboratively researching about it, you also
get to attain new levels of understanding by working with people who know
something about things you don’t. These types of peer scaffolding can be seen
through the lens of Vygotsky’s More Knowledgeable Other (Vygotsky, 1978).
In the recent Video Games and
Learning MOOC on coursera Steinkuhler and Squire asked participants in the MOOC
to contribute to a project called the Playful Learning database. Collaborative
research doesn’t have to be about papers. Rather, a group of students in a course
can contribute to project like Playful Learning or wikipedia by picking topics
that are related to the class they are in, but also intersect topics that they
are interested in.
Again, this is not necessarily
an option in all courses, but in upper level undergraduate courses and graduate
courses it’s a interesting thing to think about adding into your course. One of
the biggest things that I hear students complain a lot about is group work, and
research isn’t something that is neatly tied together in one semester’s time,
or fits 100% with the content of the course. How does one balance academic
schedules and people’s dislike of group work?
Perhaps certain incentives like being able to publish in a peer reviewed
journal that only accepts collaborative research could be an option. Or, perhaps offering local or regional
conferences for students to present their work among peers and established
researchers. Of course, there is always the possibility that students will feel
good about contributing to something that they are passionate about, like a
wikipedia article on their favorite movie, television show, or video game. There is no one answer to the “what’s in it
for me?” question.
Conclusion
In this last series of articles
we examined some techniques and tools used in the world of MOOCs to drive
student learning and engagement. These tools and techniques don’t necessarily
need stay segregated in the world of MOOCs, but we can learn from them and
adapt them into our traditional online courses. With some solid instructional
design, and a little imagination, materials and tools such as OER, digital
badges (part 1 of this series), easter eggs, blogging and tweeting; and techniques such as peer grading (part 1
of this series), open communities and collaborative writing have the potential
to enhance what goes on in a traditional online course. This is by no means an
exhaustive list of things we can learn from MOOCs, and I am sure that as time
progresses we will have more that we can borrow from them. One thing is for
certain: watch the MOOC space, and keep an open mind.
References:
●
Anderson, T. Rourke, L., Garrison, D. R., & Archer, W. (2001). Assessing
teaching presence in a computer conferencing context. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 5(2), 1-17.
●
Elavsky, C. M., Mislan, C., Elavsky, S. (2011). When
talking less is more: exploring outcomes of Twitter usage in the large-lecture
hall. Learning, Media and Technology.
36(3). pp 215-233. DOI:10.1080/17439884.2010.549828
●
Kolowich, S. (2013). Georgia Tech and Coursera Try to Recover From MOOC
Stumble. Retrieved from: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/georgia-tech-and-coursera-try-to-recover-from-mooc-stumble
● Smith,
K. (2009). The Twitter Experiment - Twitter in the Classroom. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WPVWDkF7U8
●
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society. Harvard University Press.
Links:
●
Easter Egg Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)
●
EC&I: http://eci831.ca/
●
Gamification
[Coursera / Werbach / UPenn]: https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification
●
gRSShopper: http://grsshopper.downes.ca/
●
E-learning and
Digital Cultures [Coursera / Knox; Saybe; Ross; Sinclair; Macleod / U of
Edinburg]: https://class.coursera.org/edc-002/class
●
Open Badge Initiative: http://openbadges.org/
●
Playful Learning: http://beta.playfullearning.com/
●
Video Games and
Learning [Coursera / Steinkuhler & Squire / UW Wisconsin]: https://class.coursera.org/videogameslearning-001/class/index
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