Granny dumping

I came across this appalling phenomenon for the first time yesterday. I was discussing the care of the elderly with a friend who told me that ‘granny dumping’ is becoming increasingly common in India. My friend is Indian.  On returning home I searched for this on the internet and am even more shocked to find that this is a world-wide phenomenon that has been happening for years. Elderly people are abandoned by their relatives who then make themselves uncontactable; they are left outside a hospital, bus station, or in any public place unknown to them. In India they are taken to festivals at a distance from their villages and left there.

It is because of situations like this, because my own mother has dementia, because I am ageing myself (aren’t we all!) and because the number of people over 65 in the population is increasing dramatically (see Older America for US figures), that I have signed up for Sarah Kagan and Anne Shoemaker’s Growing Old Around the Globe MOOC.

 

Image from the course Facebook site https://www.facebook.com/oldglobecoursera

In their introduction to the MOOC Sarah and Anne write

The world is ageing – people are older and societies are facing hard realities. What are we to make our lives in this time of global ageing?

Growing old is discussed today in ominous terms – concerns about disease, dysfunction, and destitution are daily discussed by media and policy makers. What are individuals, families, communities and societies to make of an ageing world? We analyze contemporary topics in psychological and social ageing from a global perspective. Each week, we pose a question to be explored and discussed online. Participants are encouraged to contribute their experiences and perspectives as we create a global community to discuss age, ageing, and the science of gerontology in action.

Thank you to Sarah and Anne for inviting me to be a Teaching Assistant on this course. I am very much looking forward to it.

The Twitter stream for this course is @OldGlobeMOOC where Sarah is already posting some resources and I have posted the link to the Facebook site above.

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Describing open learning environments and emergent learning

Recent work on developing our framework for describing emergent learning (see Footprints of Emergence   and Emergent Learning and Learning Ecologies in Web 2.0 ) has been taxing our powers of description. By we, I mean my colleague Roy Williams and me. The work of Paul Cilliers has been helpful (see below)

How can we have confidence in the footprints, when the footprint (a graphic description of a learning experience), if individually drawn, depicts an interpretation of the learning experience based on subjective personal reflection on that experience, and the scoring factors themselves can be open to personal interpretation?

This ongoing work in seeking to describe and clarify what we mean by emergent and prescribed learning is progressing on our open wiki ‘Footprints of Emergence’. There has been quite a bit of interest in this public wiki with upwards of 50 unique daily visitors, which is very encouraging.

In particular we have been very interested in the work that a colleague from Austria – Jutta Pauschenwein, (FH JOANNEUM, University of Applied Sciences, Graz, ZML – Innovative Learning Scenarios) has been doing in relation to using the framework we have developed. Jutta has written a number of blog posts about this, but here is the most recent one written in English – Footprints for “Emerging Learning” – Variety of a creative method of reflection.

This work of Jutta’s (and her team) and of others who have drawn footprints of their courses or learning experiences, and shared them with us on our wiki has motivated us to further discuss our understanding of the factors we use for scoring the footprints and describing learning experiences. It has become increasingly clear that each footprint is unique to the individual who is drawing it and that if footprints of the same course are drawn by different people, they will be different. Does this invalidate the process or the framework? Our answer is ‘No’. Each person’s learning experience, and perspective on that learning process, is unique to them.  The value of the framework is, we hope, in providing a mechanism for articulating that experience, and in the discussion around this articulation.

Now it could be argued that this is simply an excuse for vagueness and of course this argument needs to be taken seriously. Any research or discussion of learning should be rigorous, and we hope that in our efforts to clarify the meaning/description of the factors that we use in our framework, we will be adding to the rigour of the research.

However, we are also aware that all learning is context dependent and in particular, that the open, emergent learning that we are seeking to describe takes place in complex systems, where there are no straightforward right or wrong answers.

Particularly helpful in explaining our position on this is the work of Paul Cilliers and in particular his article – Complexity, Deconstruction and Relativism

Cilliers, P. (2005). Complexity, Deconstruction and Relativism. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(5), pp.255–267. Available at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/22/5.toc

Cilliers writes that we should not underestimate the complexity of much of what we try to understand. It is difficult in complex systems to get agreement on meaning. He urges researchers to be ‘modest’ (not weak, but responsible) in the claims they make, because knowledge is always provisional, always contingent and contextual and the context has to be interpreted. My experience is that it is difficult to maintain a ‘modest’ stance in the face of requests for ‘the answer’.

Cilliers explains that in describing complex systems we have to reduce the complexity, which is what we have been struggling with in our framework. To reduce the complexity we have to leave some things out. In our framework we use 25 factors to describe prescribed and emergent learning and we have, more than once, had the discussion about where we draw the line, because our discussions often raise the possibility of adding another factor. The problem is that what is left out influences the description as much as what is left in.

Cilliers writes that complexity is messy and all frameworks are compromised to some extent.

‘There is no stepping outside of complexity (we are finite beings), thus there is no framework for frameworks. We choose our frameworks.’ (p.259)

‘To talk about the complex world as if it can be understood is clearly a contradiction of another kind and this is a contradiction with ethical implications.’ (p.261)

Cilliers has so perfectly described the issues we are wrestling with in the work we are doing in attempting to better understand open learning environments and emergent learning.

With the advent of MOOCs and a huge surge of interest in open, distant and online learning, how can we best describe learners’ experiences in these and more traditional environments? How can learners make sense of and articulate their own experiences? How how can we design environments which will help learners to work in messy complex systems?

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OER13 Conference, Tues 26 March

Tomorrow my colleague from Oxford Brookes University, George Roberts, will be presenting a workshop at the OER13 conference – in Nottingham, UK. He will be joined on Skype, by Marion Waite.

This paper/workshop is one of the outcomes of the FSLT12 MOOC , which we worked on last year and will run again this year from 8^th May to the 14^th June. We have also worked on three further papers as an outcome of FSLT12.

• Waite, M., Mackness, J., Roberts, G., & Lovegrove, E. (under review 2013). Liminal participants & skilled orienteers: A case study of learner participation in a MOOC for new lecturers. JOLT

• Mackness, J., Waite, M., Roberts, G. & Lovegrove, E. (to be submitted 2013). Learning in a Small, Task-Oriented, Connectivist MOOC: Implications for Higher Education.  eLearning Papers

• Lovegrove et al. (in progress) Moving online, becoming ‘massive’: turning the face-to-face ‘First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’ into a MOOC. BeJLT

The OER13 workshop will follow a similar format to the presentation that George made to the ELESIG community  earlier this month, but will explore MOOC meanings more deeply from, threshold concept, community of practice and third space theory perspectives.

Having looked through the OER13 website, I can’t see that any presentations are being live streamed, but hopefully recordings will be uploaded, and there is a Twitter channel – #oer13

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ETMOOC Orientation Week

ETMOOC which is being offered by Alec Couros and his conspirators has just come to the end of its first week – which focused on Orientation.

ETMOOC is described as a MOOC with a ‘weak centre’ which marks it out as being very different to OLDSMOOC, which I have been ‘observing’. OLDSMOOC feels as though it has a strong centre, even though it is distributed across a variety of platforms.

This week I attended ETMOOC’s live Orientation session and an Introduction to Twitter session and from these sessions ETMOOC does feel very different to OLDSMOOC. For a start it has a very different audience who this week have been asked to introduce themselves in the ETMOOC Google Community. My email inbox became so inundated with posts that I had to set up a filter.

At the beginning of the week I was very struck by Tomas Lorincz’s introduction and that together with many of the other introductions has made me realize that I will have to do something more creative with my text-based introduction on this blog – but that is going on my ‘to do’ list, for sometime in the future.

And now at the end of this week, I go to my filtered folder and right at the top is this post by Glenn Hervieux which describes participation in a MOOC like working on a jigsaw puzzle. I think this is a great analogy.

Evidently ETMOOC has almost 1500 participants from over 60 countries,  355 blogs have subscribed to the blog hub  (and as an aside, sorry but I really do not like the idea of featured blog posts -feels a bit competitive and not quite in the spirit of community) – 200 people attended the first Orientation session in Blackboard Collaborate and 71 were in the second session that I attended.

Participants have been invited to run a session if they are interested. Nice touch!

An interesting point is that ETMOOC is being run on a ‘zero budget’. Evidently ‘not one dollar has exchanged hands’.

Some principles of participation were strongly emphasized:

• Collaborative and cooperative working on shared problems of education and society

• Collaborative creation of experience

• Trust (much was made of this)

• This is a connectivist MOOC  (cMOOC) which relies on its members to connect and co-create knowledge. cMOOCs are discursive communities creating knowledge together (Cormier 2012)

•  There is no assessment, but badges will be awarded

• Topics will be crowdsourced

• Participants will control their own learning spaces, but key questions are 1) How are you making your learning visible? 2) How are you contributing to the learning of others?

Many of the particpants in ETMOOC appear to be new to online learning and were reminded that many people are afraid when first posting online or joining a MOOC. This video was used to excellent effect to illustrate how that might feel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebtGRvP3ILg

There is lots of advice on how to participate in this MOOC including a Dynamic Guide to Participation

And recordings of the live sessions are in the Archive

The topic for next week is Connected Learning.

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OLDSMOOC Week 1

There is lots of evidence that there was plenty of activity in Week 1. There is even evidence that participants who really dislike Cloudworks are hanging on in there!

I am observing OLDSMOOC rather than participating. From my perspective, it seems that quite a bit was achieved in the first week.

• There was plenty of discussion about the meaning of learning design

• I also found that the discussion thread “Introduction to learning design” resonated with me.

• There is discussion in Google + where a School Study Group has formed.

• More study circles are listed here – Study Circles.

• There were plenty of project proposals posted to the Dream Bazaar and evidence of groups forming and projects being started.

• The project proposal that most interested me and which I will be following with interest is David Jenning’s Designing for Agility: experiences that learners can reconfigure easily and cheaply   . Here are David’s reflections on Week 1 and the reflections of other participants are listed here.

Also interesting this week was the Google Hangout meeting.

I watched the recording . I had wondered how they were going to manage this given that I think only a very limited number of people can attend a Google Hangout (10?).  In the event only one participant joined the event in Google Hangout. Others participated by posting questions to Twitter. Was this sufficient to help people feel connected to the course?

Comments that I noted from the Hangout recording were:

• OLDSMOOC assumes a high level of connectivity and technical competence. Was this stated in the initial ‘blurb’. I’ll have to go back and check.

• More needs to be done to understand what we mean by accessibility when learning in MOOCs. It’s obviously more than, for example, being able to access Cloudworks

• What are the constraints of designing for an invisible audience? I wonder how many of the project designs will tackle this problem.

• A vibrant community is forming in OLDSMOOC despite the difficulties people are having with the distributed platforms. Its interesting to reflect on what it is that is motivating people.

• Finding a project team is recognised as a challenge.  I’m not sure that the default position of – if you can’t find a team you can work on your own – will satisfy those that can’t. I wonder what could have been done to support this process – or whether it is necessary to support this process. Should we simply accept that MOOCs are ‘sink or swim’ environments?

• It’s accepted that some participants (like me) will be dipping in and out, but those working on a project (particularly if in a team) will have an incentive to stay the course. There seem to be enough people diving in and getting their hands dirty to allow many to simply put their toes in the water and project leaders seems to be emerging. Again, its interesting to reflect about the design characteristics of OLDSMOOC that are enabling this process.

• It’s the job of the facilitators to put people in touch with each other. I’m wondering how much this has been done and whether its even realistic in a MOOC.

• There seems to be a slow recognition that many skills are required for participation in a MOOC and that group formation is a messy process. Perhaps more mentors are needed. How do we design for messy learning?

• There is a tension between a nicely designed experience and the mess of reality, but the more structured the process the less democratic.

I liked the honesty with which the OLDSMOOC conveners discussed the challenges they are facing and once again I really appreciate the daily summaries – see Announcements to catch up.

Week 2 which is already underway is being led by Josh Underwood and is focussing on the influence of context on learning design.

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OLDSMOOC Design

Despite the launch hiccup, OLDSMOOC  appears to be off to a flying start. There is a lot of activity in the Google group discussion forums and on Cloudworks.

These are the links I have so far gathered:

OLDSMOOC HOME – https://sites.google.com/a/olds.ac.uk/oldsmooc/home 

• OLDSMOOC Week 1 summaries – (I have collected these emails for future reference)
• Bibsonomy
• Google groups
• OLDSMOOC Blogs
• OLDSMOOC Dream Bazaar
• Cloudworks
• Twitter

These are my observations so far.

This MOOC requires significant navigation skills, because discussion is widely distributed. There is plenty of help on how to navigate if you can find it.

The daily summaries are very helpful, but must require so much work. The team must already be exhausted – either that or they have a lot of people working on this MOOC to distribute the load, which of course raises the investment cost.

These summaries remind participants on a daily basis what they need to do, should be doing, and where they should be doing it and urges them to do it right, for example, to post in the right place etc.

A lot of participants are fully engaged and have completed the ‘dream bazaar’ activity – where participants are asked to

‘Describe a learning situation you are involved in, a change you would like to see in that situation, and how you think you can bring about that change.’

The next stage is for people to team up and work on design projects together, which might be difficult for those who have entered the MOOC as individuals rather than as a team, or alongside colleagues. As Helen Whitehead (@helenwhd) has tweeted:

No idea how to “form a team” in #oldsmooc. Feels like choosing sports teams at school! Be the one left over, lol

All this leaves me with a couple of questions

1. Does this MOOC need the amount of prescription that is a significant part of its design?

Diana Laurillard has commented on my last blog post

‘….the basic MOOC is ok for CPD, but still needs some good learning design. It’s not really enough to say ‘here are the concepts, now go and discuss among yourselves’. I’ve just experienced a MOOC a bit like that, and it’s just not enough.’

And she distinguishes between ‘professional’ and ‘student’ MOOCs

‘an important distinction could be between the ‘professional’ MOOC and the ‘student’ MOOC. The former requires facilitation and can be lighter on design, but the latter definitely needs design as well as facilitation. The former is a good model for CPD, the latter would be more like an undergraduate course (which then needs an awful lot more learning design than the basic MOOC usually provides).

For me, it’s not a question of professional or student. My understanding of MOOCs (cMOOCs) is still that they are intended to exemplify the principles of autonomy, diversity, openness and connectedness/interaction. Diversity means amongst other things, a mix of novices and experts (professionals and students) who learn from each other.

A cMOOC (or the original intention of cMOOCs) is about a personal learning journey – not about a required/intended/desired outcome – and in that sense I am interested to see the extent to which this highly structured MOOC, with a clear requirement for an intended outcome (a project design), supports personal learning journeys.

2. Which leads, community or curriculum – in this MOOC?

For me at the moment it feels like the curriculum is leading, in the sense that the ‘course’ is highly structured and this structure is very much in the control of the MOOC designers. It will be interesting to see how it develops as participants start working on their projects. If the MOOC is successful in facilitating the formation of teams, I suspect that that is where the negotiation of learning will happen and where the community will begin to lead.

These questions are of interest to me in relation to my work on emergent learning with Roy Williams and Simone Gumtau. See Footprints of Emergence for a discussion of emergence and prescribed learning if you are interested – and anyone is welcome to join our wiki  for further information and sharing of thinking/ideas.

Finally, a question that I am mulling over at the moment, and I don’t think anyone has discussed so far in this MOOC, but I have certainly not read everything, is

What is the difference between learning design and planning for learning?

I have spent many hours in my teaching career planning for learning, at macro and micro levels, but I have never thought of myself as a learning designer.

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JOLT Special Issue on MOOCs

The MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT at http://jolt.merlot.org/) has released a Call for Papers for a special issue on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), to be published in Summer (June) 2013.

The Guest Editors of the special issue are George Siemens (Athabasca University), Valerie Irvine (University of Victoria), and Jillianne Code (University of Victoria).

Proposals in the form of extended abstracts (500 words) are due on November 15, 2012, with full manuscripts due on January 31, 2013.

The full Call for Papers is available at the following URL: http://jolt.merlot.org/jolt_moocs_cfp.pdf

The Oxford Brookes FSLT12 MOOC team is thinking about this. For me it raises again the question of what makes a good Abstract. In this case the extended Abstract is going to be the deciding factor in getting a paper accepted, so it is important to get it right.

I’m looking for some good advice on this. Any suggestions?

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Is structure counter to cMOOC philosophy?

This was a question that came out of our FSLT12 Research Review meeting today. We were discussing what we have found out about the ways in which people participated and learned in the FSLT12 MOOC  -  and the extent to which this was constrained by the structure and curriculum we designed into the MOOC.

These questions have been timely for me. I have been pondering for quite a few days now about the approach taken by George Siemens and Rory MGreal to their Openness in Education MOOC, which I signed up for.

I was completely baffled at the start of the MOOC on September 10^th when there was nothing on the site. Apparently this was down to technical failure, but I’m wondering how many other people were contacting ‘friends’ to find out what was going on. To what extent is communication a part of structure and curriculum? But even now that the MOOC has got going and has been explained as follows …..

This course is based on a connectivist model of learning that Stephen Downes and I have been developing since 2008. We will provide some readings each week, but the course is really driven by learner contributions and resources. Which means that if no one blogs, the course gets pretty boring . Once you’ve submitted your blog, please include the course tag (oped12) in your posts and they will be aggregated into a daily newsletter. Please be patient as it typically takes a day or two to get ramped up with the course.

We don’t have a central discussion forum set up…learning happens in many places, sites, and tools. More on that here: http://open.mooc.ca/how.htm If you feel a place of interaction needs to be created, please create it and share with others using the course tag.

…. it’s quite difficult to find the content and it seems that there are not going to be any synchronous sessions, where people could gather/connect if they so wished.

David Wiley has made similar comments in a blog post, but brainysmurf  has responded in the comments on his blog

It’s really up to us as participants to decide what to do with the facilitators’ content (if anything), to develop our own live sessions if we want to and to share our resources as we see fit. That shift in power/control/effort is going to rattle more than a few people, I bet!

Am I rattled? Well, not rattled, but certainly questioning whether this extremely ‘hands off’ approach is in the best interest of learners.

Which comes back to the question of just how much structure and support should MOOC conveners provide. I know there are no right or wrong answers; and to come back to the initial question, I’m not sure how much or in what ways a structure/curriculum constrains learning, but then I’m also not sure how much a lack of structure/curriculum constrains learning.

Is structure counter to cMOOC philosophy? I don’t think so. I don’t see that the principles of connectivism – autonomy, diversity, openness and interaction across distributed platforms, or the key activities of cMOOCs – aggregate, remix, repurpose, feedforward, necessarily militate against structure or a curriculum.

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Caught between a MOOC and a hard place

The title of this post is a tweet that has just been posted by Lisa Lane. It so perfectly describes what is happening on the Pedagogy First programme that I have pinched it for this post.

The Pedagogy First programme has only just started and I already find it to be full of contradictions.

Lisa has described it as a MOOC – actually a SMOOC (i.e. a small MOOC),  but I’m beginning to realize that this is misleading. The actual course site doesn’t refer to MOOCs. It is in fact an open online course, so more structured, more teacher led, more prescribed, less messy etc. than my understanding of MOOCs.

The programme has been designed to be open, but I’m also beginning to realize that a ‘constrained’ and ‘structured’ openness is what is required. There are good reasons for this, mainly related to helping ‘novices’ to settle in.  It seems that ‘open’ in relation to this course has a specific meaning, i.e. open and free to the world to join in, but not ‘open’ enough to cope with the diversity of opinions presented by a diverse mix of novices and experienced online learners. Experienced online learners are nowadays very likely to have ‘MOOC’ experience and be influenced by this, whereas novices will have neither online experience nor MOOC experience.

The programme requires a weekly blog post, tagged with ‘potcert’ which feeds into the course site. In a recent blog comment Lisa describes her blog as ‘I try hard to keep in mind it’s my blog, like my house. People can stop by, but they don’t live there like I do’.

This is how I think of my blog – my domain to write what I want, but it seems that there are restrictions on what we can write if our post is to feed into the Pedagogy First course site, for example, we are urged to keep our posts short, to not use ‘jargon’, to not discuss things that might be ‘jumping ahead’ in the syllabus, to focus only on the tasks required by the syllabus, to not post anything controversial. If we want to do this, then we should not tag our posts with ‘potcert’ even if we think the topic is related to online pedagogy.

I have worked on enough online courses and MOOCs to understand the dilemma and to recognize that novices can easily be scared off.  In my last post I wrote that veteran MOOCers may need to hold back a bit – but that has to be their own decision. My decision following this discussion and now that I understand how the Pedagogy First course works, is not to tag my posts with ‘potcert’.

I don’t think it works to tell bloggers what they can do on their own blogs, particularly if they have been blogging for many years. Also should we expect some to limit their thinking and writing while others catch up? How would you feel if your child was experiencing this at school?

Maybe a better approach is to focus on the novices, i.e. get the mentors working with them from the word go (my understanding is that the mentors haven’t started yet), make posts which explicitly state what the nature of open courses is, tell them to expect to be confused and find it overwhelming, tell them to pick and choose and so on.

Only two days in and this course has already raised so many issues. I think Lisa is right – the course is currently between a MOOC and a hard place.  I wouldn’t be surprised if many online courses begin to experience this as MOOCs become more commonplace.

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The challenge of ‘openness’ in small MOOCs

An interesting discussion on the Pedagogy First course blog has sparked off further thoughts about issues around ‘openness’.  This post is, in part, a response to some of the thoughts posted by Alan Levine, and the responses of others, which have provoked this further thinking.

Martin Weller has said that ‘Openness is a state of mind’.   Overall I agree with this, but is openness context dependent? My mind isn’t your mind, my experience might not be your experience, my location won’t necessarily be your location and so on. How we understand and experience openness is individual to each learner. Carmen Tschofen and I discussed this in our paper  -  Connectivism and dimensions of individual experience.

No place is  it more important to remember this, than in a small course/community/MOOC in which novice learners are working alongside ‘expert’ or experienced learners and where the topic is learning to teach.

FSLT12  was such a course, and so too is Pedagogy First – they are both small open online task-oriented MOOCs  focusing on developing learners as teachers/lecturers/facilitators, with an emphasis on developing an understanding of pedagogy. In addition, both these courses are offered for assessment, so, for example, an assessment requirement of the Pedagogy First course is for regular blogging and open sharing of completed tasks; the first task for assessment in FSLT12 was open reflective writing.

‘Openness’ in these circumstances is no mean feat.

Experiences of learners new to working in online environments have been well researched (Sharpe and Benfield, 2005). Feelings of over-exposure, isolation, inability to cope with navigating the online environment, inability to cope with the abundance of information, the lack of visual cues to support interpretation of others’ comments, feelings of disorientation, not knowing how to balance time on and offline, feelings of anxiety and intense emotional responses – are all common examples of how people new to the online environment might feel.

But in an open course we have people with these experiences working alongside ‘veteran’ MOOCers who are familiar with the chaotic complexity and hustle and bustle of the open MOOC market place. These veterans enter an open network knowing what to expect.

So how do we bring these two groups together?  In the Pedagogy First course, there has been a call for mentors, meaning that there is an expectation that experienced MOOCers will support novice MOOCers.

As part of the Pedgaogy First programme we have been asked to buy the book –  Susan Ko and Steve Rossen (2010) Teaching Online: A Practical Guide (3rd ed) Taylor and Francis – and I am looking forward to reading what it has to say about initiating newcomers into an online course. My copy is in the post!

In the meantime I am revisiting my well-thumbed and very familiar copy of Gilly Salmon’s book ‘e-Moderating: The Key to Teaching and Learning Online’. In this she presents a 5-stage model for facilitating online learning.

http://www.atimod.com/e-moderating/5stage.shtml

In my experience, following this model helps to avoid a lot of the pitfalls associated with online learning. Salmon recommends starting with ensuring access, as has been done in the Pedagogy First course, and focusing to begin with on socialization, which she says helps to ensure the success of an online course.

Socialization will of course continue throughout the course, but it is necessary at the beginning to develop the sense of belonging and trust needed to enable later, weightier and more challenging discussions. Salmon says these discussions happen at Stage 5 –  ‘different skills come into play at this stage. These are those of critical thinking and the ability to challenge the ‘givens’ (p.48).

So how does this relate to ‘openness’ in small connectivist MOOCs such as FSLT12 and Pedagogy First? My thinking following discussions in Pedagogy First is

•  ‘Openness’ as a ‘state of mind’ takes time to develop. It is not a given and cannot be assumed. It should not even be expected, if we believe in the autonomy of learners, i.e. freedom to choose. But if we want it in our MOOCs (thinking here of MOOCs as ‘courses’ as in the case of Pedagogy First) then we should allow time for ‘novices’ to work through the 5 stages of Gilly Salmon’s model.

• Veteran MOOCers may need to hold back, or at least carefully consider how their posts might be interpreted by novices. This doesn’t necessarily apply to an open network or even to a MOOC such as CCK08, but I think it does apply to a MOOC that has been designed for novices and where there is a recognition that novices will need mentoring.

• For me when I facilitate or convene an online course/MOOC I hope that the course design/environment will encourage the development of autonomous and connected learners who embrace openness, alternative perspectives and diversity, and engage in critical thinking, stimulating dialogue and reflective learning. This will not happen if they ‘drop out’ in the early stages. One of the criticisms of MOOCs is the high drop out rate.

Stephen Downes has said, to teach is to model and demonstrate, and to learn is to practice and reflect.  So maybe modeling and demonstrating, practicing and reflecting on Gilly Salmon’s model is not a bad place to start for small task-oriented MOOCs.

And finally, perhaps in the case of small MOOCs it is easier to think of them as open courses rather than open networks. Maybe this would bring a different perspective to the way we work in them and what our expectations might be.

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