The Ed Techie

What sort of open do you want?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/42386632@N00/8528725328/ >

I've been thinking about openness in education a lot recently (my plan is to write a book on this, more on that later). And I've slowly, probably years after everyone else, come to the conclusion that it's a mistake to talk about openness as if it's one thing. There may have been a time when it was, when all the forms of openness blended easily into one indistinguishable lump, but that's not the case now. Not only are there different aspects of openness, but I'm beginning to feel that some may be mutually exclusive with others, or at least prioritising some means less emphasis on others. 

What do I mean by this? Well I could list the different types of openness in education: OERs, MOOCs, open access, open scholarship, etc. But instead it's more useful to consider the motivation for openness, why has someone adopted an open approach in the first place? Here are some possibilities:

Increased audience - you want as many people as possible to be able get at your resource, be it an article, book, course, video or presentation. The main aim here is to remove barriers to people accessing it. This means it has to be free, easily shareable, online, and with easy rights.

Increased reuse - related to the above, but slightly different, you want people to take what you have created and combine it with other elements, adapt it and republish. The same considerations are required as above, but with an extra emphasis on minimal rights and also creating the resource in convenient chunks that can be adapted. Whereas the first motivation might mean releasing your song online, the second motivation might lead you to sharing each of the tracks that constitute the song separately under a CC-BY licence.

Increased access - this is different from the first motivation in that you want to reach particular groups who may be disadvantaged. You have open access in that you do not require formal entry qualifications. You may decide that free is also the best way to gain increased access, but that may not follow. If you want to work with learners who often fail in formal education then simply making a resource free doesn't really help. What they need is material aimed at this audience and specific support. Open access is not just about price.

Increased experimentation - one of the reasons many people adopt open approaches is that it allows them to do different things. Whether that's use different media, create a different identity, or experiment with approach that wouldn't fit within the normal constraints of work, an open method allows this. If this is your goal, then the emphasis is on getting an audience that will feedback on this and maybe participate in this experimentation.

Increased reputation - being networked and online can help improve your, or your institution's, profile. Openness here allows more people to see what you do (the motivation of increased audience) but your main aim is to enhance your reputation. If you were an academic who really wanted to be on the keynote circuit then operating in the open, publishing openly, creating online resources, being active in social media and establishing an online identity might be a good way to achieve this. Here openness is a method by which you realise a different goal, but it could be anything. The emphasis here then will be on networking and using openness to establish identity.

Increased revenue - while we may have suspicions about open washing and using openness as a route to commercial success, it's true that an open, or part-open model can be an effective business model. The freemium approach works this way, where a service is open to a large extent, but some users pay for additional services. If this is the goal then openness works by creating a significant demand for the product.

Increased participation - you may need input from an audience, but can't pay to access them. This could be crowdsourcing in research, or getting feedback on a book or research proposal. Being open allows others to access it and then provide the input you require. Openness here can be quite targeted, you want to reach a particular audience and get them involved, not necessarily as large an audience as possible.

Let's take an example in education and consider it from these different motivations. Let's imagine your university (or a university you know) wants to create a MOOC. They've heard all about them and think they should be doing something in this area (this actually covers about 90% of university's approach to MOOCs). They seek your advice, so you go around to a bunch of different stakeholders and you ask them "what is the aim of the MOOC? What do you want from it?"

Now, the person from marketing says they want to increase the university's online profile and reputation. From this perspective you propose a MOOC in a big hitting subject, featuring a big name academic. The subject will be "Life on Mars". It'll be expensive, high end production, acting as a showcase for the university and getting it in the press.

When you speak to the Dean of the Science faculty they say they are concerned about student recruitment on their post grad course. They want it to bring in high fee paying overseas students. The model that might work here is one that makes the first 6 weeks open, and target a specific audience, who can then sign up. You suggest offering badges and allowing people to build up to taking the full masters.

You then speak to an academic who is really keen to try a student-led approach. They feel frustrated by the customer-led focus of conventional teaching and see in MOOCs an opportunity to try some more radical pedagogic approaches that they have been blocked from implementing. They don't see it as particularly massive in terms of audience, but it will be a rich learning experience for those who do it, as they will be creating the curriculum. You propose a MOOC based in Wordpress, and featuring a range of technologies with learners co-creating the content.

Later you have a conversation with a funding council who want to bring under-represented groups into science. They will need a lot of support, but they are willing to fund the provision of mentors and support groups in the community. You suggest a MOOC based on adapting existing materials, with carefully targeted support and minimal technical barriers.

And so on - you can see that from each of these perspectives the resultant MOOC would be a very different beast. It would be open in each of these scenarios, but with a different emphasis on the form that openness should take.

So, now that openness has to a large extent won out as an approach, the question is no longer 'do you want to be open?' but rather 'what sort of open do you want?'. 

My MOOC tech ecosystem

On my open course H817Open I use a mixture of technology, and thought it might be useful to describe these here, and also to indicate what I'd like to do beyond this.

The technologies are:

OpenLearn - This is where the bulk of the content is hosted and also forums. It is provided by the OU for OU content only, so not an open content system. It made sense to use this, but some recent changes have made the page rendering slow, and the design is suitable for a one-off visit to find an OER in that it prompts you to find other resources, it uses up too much screen real estate on this for a MOOC.

WordPress - this is the blog aggregator, based on the DS106 model. Students blog on their own spaces, but they register their blog with us. We then syndicate all the feeds using the FeedWordPress plug-in. I wanted them to use any blog they liked, so I tried using a Google Form that has a Martin Hawksey script to autodiscover the feed. This hasn't really worked as feeds are hidden all over the place and I've ended up adding most in by hand. We ask students to tag posts with #h817open and only posts with this tag are accepted (there is a setting in FeedWordPress for this), so if they blog about going shopping, that doesn't get pulled in. This has worked quite well. For next year I think I would ask learners to restrict their platforms to blogger, wordpress or tumblr as we can then write a bit of code that will automatically discover feeds in the known locations for these platforms.

Mailchimp - I send a weekly email outlining what is coming up and addressing any issues. This has been surprisingly important, and probably the key component. Mailchimp allows you to send emails to upto 2000 subscribers for free. I get a csv file from the openlearn platform and upload this, then create the weekly email. A lot of the identity and tone of the course arises from this email so it's worth investing some time in getting it right (I don't know that I have).

GMail - I set up a generic email account for the course to handle queries

Cloudworks and badges - we experimented with badges and the Cloudworks system has a very neat tool for creating a badge. However it's a bit fiddly in that you have to create a cloudworks id and then a mozilla one.

Blackboard Collaborate - I deliberately haven't scheduled many synchronous events as I wanted a more open course in terms of timings, but I did get George Siemens to give a talk and we have a discussion and review session planned. The OU has signed a contract with Blackboard so we went with this for easiness, but I think I would explore Google Hangouts next year.

Twitter - I ask people to use the #h817open hashtag, but I have to say Twitter has proven to be less significant, or less active, than I expected. I would probably make a specific activity around this next year to encourage use early on.

Google Plus - I didn't create a specific Google Plus community, but learners created one immediately and it has proven to be lively, interesting and supportive. It has beaten twitter as the forum of choice.

Blogs - as I mentioned above, most student activity is undertaken on their own blogs. They can use any platform they like (although note my reservations about this for next year). I've been trying to promote a 'collaboration-lite' model whereby you can work largely independently, but through the aggregator (or Google Plus) you can connect and share as much as you like. I think this has worked for some learners but not others.

So that is my collection of tools - a mixture of in-house and out-there technologies. I met Philipp Schmidt last week and at the same time had a twitter conversation with Martin Hawksey which has set me thinking. What I would like is an open course DIY toolkit. You come along, select which functions you want and it recommends a bunch of open technologies (although not necessarily open source) with examples of where they've been used, and hey presto, you roll your own MOOC. I may work on this soon, but if anyone wants to have a crack, let me know.

5 reasons to do a MOOC & 5 reasons not to

I gave a presentation last week with the above title. In my preparation it wavered between 10 reasons to do one, and 10 reasons NOT to do one, which indicates my ambiguous take on MOOCs, so I settled for half and half.

By "do a MOOC" here I mean for an instructor or an institution to offer one, rather than a learner take one, although you can infer some of the learner reasons also. Later in the week I followed the uniteMOOC session up at Newcastle via Twitter and some very similar responses were being given there. My presentation is below, but actually, you'd be better off looking at Sheila MacNeill's splendid Prezi on the subject, which was part of the Newcastle event.

 

5 reasons to do a MOOC & 5 reasons not to from Martin Weller

Registration open for my Open Education MOOC

A year ago we decided to rewrite one of our Master's level courses, H817, Innovation and Openness in Education. I volunteered to write one of the four blocks of the course, on open education. I blithely suggested, "I'll probably make it a MOOC." It seemed fitting as MOOCs and different flavours of openness were the subject of the block. At the time MOOCs were all a bit new, experimental and fun. 

How that glib suggestion has haunted me. As the profile of MOOCs have increased so the demands and requirements placed on creating one have multiplied. But with the help of some great people at the OU (it's been great to work with people who want to help rather than just repeating "no") we are finally ready to roll.

Yes, now you can enrol on the MOOC, which starts officially on March 16th. There is some set-up work that can be done and you'll be registered to go then when it's all live.

Not another bloody MOOC I hear you cry! Yes, but I hope to be testing some new elements as well as providing damn fine learning materials. Here's what I think is mildly distinctive about mine:

• Not celebrity focused - although it's written by me, it doesn't feature me, the activities are written in an objective style. I'm uneasy about the whole celebrity academic thing in MOOCs, but I know some people like that sense of following an expert, so we'll see if this less personality focused model works.
• Collaboration-lite pedagogy - in a lot of our formal courses we have very structured group work, which develops important team working skills, but is very time-consuming and often unpopular. I'm trying to use a 'collaboration-lite' model here (I'm not the first, DS106 and others do it very successfully). The intention is that you act as individuals, but through blogs, twitter and yes, good old-fashioned forums there is room for engagement and community. It's as take as much community as you want model. Some people like to study alone, others want to socalise, I'm hoping to cater for both.
• Open as to time - although it will run as a cohort for 7 weeks from March 16th, the course will then be 'frozen' and stay open in the OpenLearn environment. This means that although you won't be studying it with people or have any support, you can study it any time. I would like to see staff development or study groups create their own cohort and do it whenever they want.
• Mix formal and informal distance learners - Alec Couros, Dave Cormier, Jim Groom, Jonathan Worth and David Wiley have all run open boundary courses before, where the campus students mix with the informal learners. So it's not that new, but it's the first time we've done it at the OU, and I'm not sure it's been done with distance learners that much before. So it'll be interesting to see how these groups mix.
• Forum support - I've been lucky enough to get some cash to pay two of our associate lecturers to support the course by looking after forums and checking twitter. This doesn't mean they are acting as personal tutors to everyone, so don't bombard them with queries, but I'm interested to see what levels of support are needed.
• Badges - okay, not that novel, but there are three badges associated with the course, so again, I'm just interested in how much take-up of these there will be, and whether people want more.

The course outline is as follows:

• Week 1: Openness in education 
• Week 2: Open education resources
• Week 3: Moving beyond OER
• Week 4: MOOCs
• Week 5: Pedagogy in open learning
• Week 6: Operating in an open world
• Week 7: Conclusion

Go on, give it a bash, what have you got to lose but your evenings?

MOOCs are your friends

<Image Giulia Forsythe http://www.flickr.com/photos/gforsythe/8028605773/>

(I know what you're thinking: "if only someone would write an opinion blog post on MOOCs, there just aren't any out there").

Reactions to MOOCs tend to fall into two camps. The first is the MOOC will conquer all group who see them as saviours of learning and destroyers of universities. See Clay Shirky's MP3 analogy for an example (and also David Kernohan's excellent response) although this month's MOOC hyperbole award goes to this techcrunch piece.

The second camp are the dismissers. MOOCS are a fad, they aren't anything new, or they're so flawed they aren't worth considering. See for example, MOOCS fad and bubble .

What I want to consider here though is the idea of MOOCs being complementary to existing Higher Education practice. It's a line I've promoted before, in my digital scholar book I make the argument that:

"Competition with informal learning is true to an extent, but it presupposes a set amount of learning by an individual, as if they have a limited number of cognitive learning tokens to be used up in a lifetime. But it is more often the case that learning begets learning. In this respect open, informal education is complementary to formal education, indeed something of a gift, rather than a threat. In a world that generates vast amounts of niche content which people are increasingly engaged with, either through generating their own, sharing or discussing, the outcome is a larger population of active learners. A population of active learners are more likely to engage in formal study than a population of passive consumers."

I've been asked to do a couple of MOOC presentations recently, and I've tried to provide examples of where MOOCs can work in harmony with current educational practices, either boosting recruitment, enhancing the student experience or allowing different approaches. So, here's my top five ways in which MOOCs are your friend:

1. Open up a portion of courses - one could structure online (or blended) courses so a portion of them is a stand-alone MOOC. This is what I'm doing with H817, where my 7 weeks of the 20 week course is open. This allows students to see if it's the type of course they want to study, to make connections and experience studying. We found this type of trialling quite important in OpenLearn (as the research report sets out). It has several benefits for the institution and the learner. Firstly, it's the shop window, so it can increase student recruitment. Secondly, it can increase student retention, since those learners who will struggle can find this out for free, and either take a different subject, study at a different level or take preparatory material. Thirdly it can widen participation, reaching audiences you may have struggled to reach before, because they can try it for free and widening participation is one of those strategic targets many universities set themselves and then struggle to achieve.
2. Open boundary courses - DS106 and Phonar are good examples of these. A campus based course with fee-paying students supported on campus, has an open boundary so informal learners can study online too. As well as the advantages set out in 1) this has particular benefits in certain subject areas. Photography is one such area where exposure to a wider audience, including professionals and experienced hobbyists, is beneficial. But for all students there is a benefit in developing a network of peers beyond their immediate cohort.
3. MOOC collaboration - HEIs can collaborate on MOOCs which are useful for a range of their students. Why teach the same subject at several places, when you can create a high quality MOOC that they all take, and is recognised by all participating HEIs?
4. MOOC recognition - by formally recognising certain MOOCs, HEIs could shorten some of the courses they offer. For example, if you have successfully completed four of these ten MOOCs, then you can skip the first year of a degree programme and complete in two years. This may not look like a win for the HEIs, but it could be. For the students it means fees are reduced by at least a third, which might make degree study more attractive. For campus universities they are selling the 'campus experience' more, without it costing quite so much, and as with 2) we may see higher retention of students who do sign up because they've been through MOOCs already.
5. Curriculum experimentation and expansion - formal, online courses are an increasingly large investment for HEIs, which means course approval is more rigourous. The demands placed on a formal course are lessened for a MOOC (although they do not disappear), which allows for experimentation. And because you are appealing to a global audience, what is not a viable course for a campus, fee paying constituency may well be viable to a global community of informal learners. This means you can experiment with the curriculum, and find out if courses, or technology, or pedagogy, can be rolled into your formal offerings. It also means you can offer a broader curriculum, because you can offer your own low-cost MOOCs but also recognise others. "Hydro-engineering and Russian?" We do the engineering part, you do the Russian via this MOOC. 

So there you have it - MOOC as slightly annoying friend.

Twitter is your IT support

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/>

This post isn't intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I've noticed from several others also. 

I'm running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It'll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog.

Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won't go in to, I haven't been able to get this done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I've spoken to people at others unis and it isn't isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.

Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.

With time pushing on, I got some local support in IET (thanks Will), and investigated the best options. It became clear that hosting externally would be the easiest option. I asked on Twitter who the best hosting solutions were and got a great set of responses. Alan Cann suggested siteground and sent me a friend's introduction offer, so I signed up with them. In 10 minutes I'd followed their WordPress installation, installed WP, found the FeedWordPress plug-in and installed that too. The blog is here: h817open.net

My next problem was to get registration to work. I looked at what DS106 have done, and in response to a request on Twitter, Alan Levine pointed me to this solution from Martha Burtis. That was a bit beyond my coding skills. So I created a simple Google Form and embedded it in my blog. I then asked Martin Hawksey if he knew how to take a Google form output and turn it into an OPML file as FeedWordPress allows you to create a list of syndicated sites from an OPML file. He pointed me to this service, which does just that.

He and Tony also suggested some solutions which will help with autodiscovery (ie finding the feed for the blog if someone just enters their main URL). Martin lists some options here. I haven't quite cracked this yet, so it needs people to enter their feed url, which isn't ideal, so I'll keep working on this.

So, I think I have a working solution. If you have time, could you try it for me by registering your blog here and then posting something which has the tag #h817open. Only posts with this tag should appear. You can just do a test post, but perhaps more interestingly you could respond to the idea of whether "openness has won" or not with a post "Openness has (hasn't) won because..."

This took me about an afternoon. The problem is that it's quite a flaky solution, the OPML service could disappear, I don't really know if it will work for all blogs, and there's no support. So it could go down and I've got no backup. More worryingly I am at the edge of my expertise here, so I can't really do much more. So a university supported proper grown-up solution would be preferable. On the other hand, one of the things I frequently say is that the best thing we can teach our students is how to be good members of a network. And this is a clear demonstration of why I believe that. I think this tension between the innovative possibilities of new technology and the understandably cautious nature of institutional IT services will mean that we'll all need to do more of this DIY tech set-up and experimentation. And the only way to do that is to have a good network who can help.

One last plea - I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I'm serious though - it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don't have Alan and Jim's tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they'll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don't think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.

 

Hanging with the MOOC boys

Now that MOOCtober has passed, I think it's safe to talk about MOOCs again. 

As I've mentioned I'm experimenting next year with running my block of the Masters Course in Online and Distance Education as an open course. I've wanted to do this for ages, but always been blocked, but now that MOOCs are on everyone's radar, lots of elements have fallen into place that make it possible. This might be a beneficial consequence of the MOOC hype - they create an environment in which experimentation in open courses is encouraged.

My course will run for 6 weeks and is part of the longer 20 week course, H817 Openness and Innovation in elearning. It'll be interesting to see how making part of a longer course open works. My part is on Open Education, looks at OERs, MOOCs, pedagogy and technology.

As part of it I recorded an interview with Dave Cormier and George Siemens talking about MOOCs. We cover the initial idea behind MOOCs, the term itself, the new MOOCs and future directions. It also has an affordances klaxon. I thought I'd share it here too, enjoy! (Thanks to George and Dave for sparing the time for it).

Does your MOOC have penguins?

It turns out that there are no less than three MOOCs on open education coming your way. George and Stephen are running one now, David Wiley's one ran last winter and will run again this winter. And very last, I'm running one next March. My one really arose through logic and not a desire to ape George or David (although I do that often enough). I was writing a block of the new Masters level course on Innovation in education, and my block was on open education. I have a strong 'learning by doing' approach, so it made sense for the students on this block to experience it as an open course. So, the course itself is 22 weeks long, and mine is the second block, so for my bit students come out of the protected OU environment and into an open one, and it runs as a mini, self-contained course (in the OpenLearn platform).

After David's blog post the other day, I was joking with him and George on Twitter about competition between the open education MOOCs. In an effort to entice learners I promised that mine will have dancing penguins, booze and fireworks. Through her marvellous drawing skills, Giulia Forsythe visualised this for all of us:

Okay, I may have slightly oversold it there.

Firstly, I don't think the open ed MOOCs should be territorial or alpha male about the whole thing - we'll each bring different takes on it, and learners will prefer one style to another. It might be a good exercise in all three courses to get learners to compare the three in terms of pedagogy, content, technology.

Secondly, we should turn Giulia's penguin into a badge. Only the penguin badged MOOCs offer something different, either in terms or approach, coverage or activities. As I've mentioned before, the interesting thing about the early MOOCs, was the ability to experiment. This is what is lost in the new wave of industrial, commercial MOOCs. So to differentiate them, the experimental MOOCs can state what is innovative about theirs. So I'd claim that the penguin elements in mine are:

• Postgrad level
• Activity based, light collaboration model
• Hybrid approach to fee-paying and open students
• Combination of formal university systems and third party services

(I'd like to add badging to this, but there are some internal discussions going on around this, so we'll see).

So, what is the penguin in your MOOC?

Amnesimooc

You can probably dismiss this post as 'stop being defensive', but I'll log it now while it occurs to me.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the sudden interest in MOOCs from mainstream universities and the media is exciting, and has a number of benefits, but is not without its pitfalls. In the rush to fuel the MOOC hype it seems to me that some commentators have confused the possibility of running large scale (always the large scale gets them excited) open courses with running large scale online courses. The two are not synonymous. I believe it is the open element of MOOCs that is really intriguing - for me they are moOcs, whereas others see them as Moocs (if you get the distinction).

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/8929612@N04/4911298118/ by Gerry Balding>

Henry Petroski suggests we forget fundamental lessons in bridge design every 30 years, because that is the average length of an engineering career. I wonder if the same is true with distance education. We've been designing large scale distance courses, and then large scale online courses for some time now. And the differences are worth noting, because I would suggest there are differing design approaches, pedagogy, and economics for open courses and 'traditional' ones.

I haven't done a detailed analysis of (large-scale) online distance ed courses and (large scale) open courses (I expect there are a few PhDs beavering away on this very topic), but here is my off the top of my head set of characteristics for the two (based largely on my own OU experience of course).

Traditional large-scale online courses are 'production heavy', ie they spend a lot of time in crafting the course material. This material forms the basis of the content, and so goes through multiple edits, critical reads, and is produced by a team. There is a structured, supported tutor model, whereby each student is a member of a small tutor group, so they have personalised support. This is combined with cohort wide communication and interaction, typically in forums which are moderated either by the course team, paid tutors or students. The course has accredited assessment, and feedback on this forms an essential part of the student-tutor dialogue. This is a pretty standard distance education model, modified for online delivery to a large-scale. In this paper Ley Robinson and I describe the set up for a 1999 course with 12-15,000 students (that isn't as massive as the Stanford AI course, but it's essentially a scaleable model). They are costly to produce and run and therefore carry a study fee. Jones et al compare three open universities and their respective models, which are variations on this.

Large-scale open courses , or MOOCs, tend to have less focus on production I would contend, but then are more flexible and adaptable at the delivery stage. They seem to be focused around an individual instructor/academic rather than a team. Support is provided through peer networks and automated feedback. Assessment is either informal, paid for separately or automated. They can be delivered fairly cheaply by a single academic and are usually free to study.

I am definitely not trying to suggest one is better than the other. But I think it's important to distinguish the two as they may meet different needs. If studying for free is the overriding factor for you as a learner, then MOOCs are obviously the way to go. If you feel that support is important then the more traditional route may be better.

We are seeing an inevitable, and innovative, blending of the two, so this distinction shouldn't be seen as absolute. For example, some MOOCs will offer support for an additional fee. (The cynic in me think that in a few years time someone will unveil the 'completely supported MOOC' which will rather resemble my traditional model above).

In the rush to embrace MOOCs I think it is a disservice to them to fail to appreciate that it is the open element which is truly interesting, and a failure to appreciate the different needs of learners to ignore the other models of large scale online delivery. The defence rests. And has a cup of tea.

 

 

Give me an M!

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bigblue/317855467/ by bigbluemeanie>

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...