The Ed Techie

Give me an M!

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The second of MOOC musing posts:

On Twitter recently Alan Levine bemoaned that there was too much emphasis on the M in MOOCs, and I think it's the M that worries Jonathan Rees. Kate Bowles has a well reasoned post on some MOOC concerns also. I wonder if there is some truth in this – it is the manager’s dream of the infinite lecture hall that characterised early e-learning until people found out e-learning wasn’t very cheap in the end. But for a MOOC, learners aren’t paying so they can’t complain about the infinite lecture hall approach, but they will be monetised somehow (whether through accreditation, data, adverts, etc). And for that to work the M in MOOC has to equal massive. Moderate or minor won’t do.

 Let’s take each of those initials and think them through:

M – Massive. As mentioned above the massive element is appealing if you are a commercial enterprise. But if you are offering MOOCs out of interest, then they may not be massive. When Dave coined the term (it was Dave wasn't it?) I think it was more a reflection on what had happened in CCK08 – that these large numbers of learners had congregated. It was an observation rather than a prescriptive element. Open courses don’t need to be massive, and focussing on this element because it’s where the money lies, may lead to less interesting topics being proposed because they won’t achieve the mass required to kick in the money. And that’s a shame because one of the potential benefits of MOOCs is a form of liberation of the curriculum – it need no longer be dictated by what courses are profitable and meet a sufficient need. It would be a failure of imagination to apply the same constraints we currently labour under.

Open – as I mentioned in my last post, one of the disappointing aspects about the new open courses is that they are not truly open. Real openness has a number of benefits – others can take elements of the course and use it in their own courses, the course itself acts as a learning resource that anyone can dip into at anytime, it allows open research through data analysis, learners are encouraged to use their own tools rather than the artificial course system. Not being fully open loses much of the subtlety in MOOCs that made them fun in the first place.

Online – Steve Carson suggests we should call the new breed MOCs, for Massive Online Courses. But they are free, so this acronym would miss the key element that differentiates them from all the elearning we’ve been doing over the past 15 years. I had a Massive Online Course in 1999 but it was the open element that was missing. This is the no-brainer in the acronym I guess. They need to be online to really be free and work, but what might be interesting is the combination of MOOCs with local, face to face support. One could imagine a general introduction to teaching MOOC for example, which covered pedagogy, core subjects etc but accompanied by local support which placed teachers in school, added local contextualisation (eg curriculum requirements in that country) and so on. So Online needn’t mean ‘Only Online’.

Course – after a decade of OERs, it’s interesting that we’re coming back to educator constructed courses. The vision might have been of learners constructing their own personalised courses from the vast array of content out there. And while this does happen to an extent, and social tools will help it happen more, it’s also the case that one of the core functions the educator provides is to structure content into a sequence that learners can follow and have trust in. The bargain they make is this – if I do the course you have constructed then I will come out with a certain understanding of the topic. 

I guess the moral is, be careful of the acronym you dream up as someone will analyse it in excessive detail one day...

MOOCs Inc

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I thought I’d write a couple of posts around MOOCs, and in particular, the sudden awakening of senior management, media and companies to them. I don’t think this post is really saying much more than ‘hmm, interesting isn’t it?’. Having been involved on the periphery of MOOCs for a while, and knowing a lot of the real pioneers on first name terms (George, David, Stephen, Dave, Jim, Alec – see, I do know their first names), it’s been interesting to see the sudden adoption of MOOCs by others, most notably those in the US.

What we have been witnessing is the mainstreaming of the original MOOC concept. I feel kind of privileged in a way because it’s very rarely that you are close to something and see it go through this change. So it’s worth acknowledging that we are seeing this change, as so many times these things happen and later you think in retrospect, yes, that was the point that it altered.

With the Stanford AI course, then the announcement of Udacity, EdX, coursera, and Curtis Bonk’s course, it seems that barely a week has gone by without some major new announcement. As an advocate of open education I should be pleased about this, and I to a large extent I am. But I also have some niggling reservations.

The main change we are seeing is a form of institutionalisation of the MOOC approach. The previous generation was characterised by individuals – so, for example, Alec has run his course as an open one because he wanted to and could get away with it, not as a part of an institutional program at Regina. The next generation is seeing a more formal structure for delivering open courses. For Jim Groom now read MIT.

This is inevitable I suspect, at some point an idea becomes mainstreamed if it is to scale up. It also has a number of benefits. For a start it legitimises the open course approach to many, so it’s no longer “that bunch of Canadians” and therefore nothing to do with me. Secondly it streamlines the process by providing a template, platform and structure. This lowers the cost to entry in terms of the technical knowledge required. The third benefit is that it provides learners with a more robust and systematic approach. Some of the MOOC stuff previously has been experimental in nature and this has led to frustrations on the part of some learners. Lastly, and we can debate whether this is a benefit, it allows for models of commercialisation to be tested and employed. Ultimately this may make the MOOC approach more sustainable.

The upshot of all this should be that more open courses are available to more people. And that’s a good thing, which should be applauded and supported.

But I’m an academic so it’s my job to hedge things, so for all of these benefits, there are some downsides to this new phase of MOOCs.

I can’t help mourning the lack of the more experimental approach. For me, that was one of the great benefits of a MOOC – it allowed you to explore new pedagogy, technology, subject matter without being tied into the conventional restraints of a fee-paying curriculum. The new institutional MOOCs look very conventional in their approach and subject matter. But I suppose there is nothing to prevent the experimental ones still continuing.

My second misgiving is that while they are free, they are not open in the sense of being reusable and openly accessible. In general you have to sign up and get access to the course. It would be much more useful to be able to have access at all times and reuse elements in other courses. Free is very good, but interesting things happen when they’re open.

And lastly is the commercialisation element – I listed this as a benefit also, so it is ambiguous. If the model is that learners can pay if they want formal accreditation then that seems reasonable, as this will probably require some human input, and provides a means of funding course development. But when the MOOCs are set up as a commercial enterprise from the start you wonder how long before they are engaged in Facebook type data selling, for instance.

I also wonder if there isn’t an element of ‘if it wasn’t invented in the US it hasn’t been invented’ about much of this, and 10 years from now people will be writing papers that cite Stanford as the initiator of open courses.

Anyway, as I said at the start, interesting to watch it unfolding.

 

Blogging was the best decision

I have an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I was asked to write a piece about the role of blogging in academic life. In many ways this is a tad quaint, blogging is hardly the new kid on the block (indeed it is now ripe for the X is dead meme). But maybe that's the point, it's been around long enough that we can assess its impact in real terms, and not just as the new shiny thing. My approach was to take blogging as a representative for new forms of scholarship, and how it had impacted upon my practice. 

There is nothing in it that will be a surprise to readers of this blog (it doesn't contain unusual cake recipes for instance), but it was quite nice to reflect on blogging from some position of maturity (by which I mean having been blogger for a few years now, not that I am mature, which of course, I'm not). The gist is probably in this paragraph:

In terms of intellectual fulfilment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate. That keeps blogging at the top of the heap.