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

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.

FSLT12 PechaKucha Presentation

People who participated in the FSLT12 MOOC this summer and who continue to very generously give their time to support the research the FSLT12 team are currently working on,  might be interested in our contribution to this year’s ALT-C conference in Manchester, UK.

Submission of a research paper for the conference came too early for us – we had not run the MOOC – but we were invited to do a short PechaKucha presentation.

If you have not heard of these presentations before, then this site answers 20 frequently asked questions

For ALT-C  the format was slightly altered in that only 9 slides were allowed in 7 minutes, with 3 minutes for questions, as follows:

Short Presentations (PechaKuchas) (10 mins – 7 for presentation and 3 for discussion)

This format was successful at our 2011 conference. A presentation consists of up to nine images in a “PechaKucha” (PK) style format. Each presenter will have a 7 minute slot with images automatically moving on at the end of a fixed 45 second time. Three questions only will then be allowed. Discussions can of course carry on after the presentation and there will be opportunities to have further dialogue both online and face to face at the conference.

Ultimately it fell to George to deliver the presentation – none of the rest of us could attend the conference. I wish I could have been there to see this. I have never seen a PechaKucha presentation. I can’t imagine it’s easy to deliver and I wonder how much the audience gets out of it, apart from entertainment.

Here is the presentation made by George.

• Not Just Moocin About outline – http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/28011

• Not Just MoocinAbout power point presentation

Conference delegates were asked to vote for the best PechaKucha presentation. Lindsay Jordan was one of the winners

• Here is an outline of the presentation: http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/speakers/23249

• Here are the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/lindsayjordan/altc-2012-session

• Here is a photo of Lindsay ready for the presentation  http://instagram.com/p/PcOKgSx7I8/   🙂

 

Lindsay was an FSLT12 participant and has contributed to our research, so it was great news to hear she was a PechaKucha presentation winner. Congratulations Lindsay 🙂

Are MOOCs immune to rigorous investigation?

The title of this post is taken from David Wiley’s blog post that he made earlier this year. And this week on Twitter Apostolos Koutropoulos commented that there is currently a lot of comment on MOOCs, but much less research.

David Wiley mentions that his PhD student is researching MOOCs and I know that Eleni Boursinou of the Caledonian Academy in Glasgow – is researching the FSLT12 MOOC, so I suspect there are many more PhD students who are investigating MOOCs.

I think it’s probably true that there is more comment on MOOCs than published research, but the body of research is slowly growing. Here are a couple of links which point to research and there are more:

A Wikipedia site

Rita Kop and colleagues’s publications

Recently I worked with George Roberts, Marion Waite and Liz Lovegrove (from Oxford Brookes University), Joe Rosa (Cambridge University) and Sylvia Currie, BC Campus Canada (see Tutor Team), to develop and run the FSLT12 MOOC earlier this year. A funding  requirement of this MOOC is to follow it up with research.

Yesterday we had a full day review/research meeting in Oxford, on an exceptionally hot day, which made Oxford’s yellow sandstone buildings look spectacular, but made concentration a bit difficult …… but we had a very enjoyable and ultimately productive day, fuelled by edible treats and celebrated at the end of the day with a bottle of Prosecco! Thanks George and Marion 🙂

We have decided on four research papers, which we hope will reach different audiences.

1. What evidence is there for the ways people learn in MOOCs (I will lead on this one). Audience – Studies in Higher Education or BERJ
2. How do you design and plan a MOOC? (George will lead on this one). Audience – JIME or JCAL?
3. Differential participation and designing for differentiation (Marion will lead this one). Audience – IRRODL
4. The First Steps curriculum – a case study (Liz will lead this one). Audience – BeJLT and Press release for ALT, HEA, SEDA, JISC ?

We are keen to get this research out as quickly as possible. This will be a challenge for me. I am naturally a ‘slow’ researcher, but I acknowledge that there is a balance to be achieved between reflective, well thought through research and ‘missing the boat’ in relation to the fast moving conversation and developments around MOOCs.

As I have experienced before, it is difficult to know how open to be about ongoing research, i.e. in what sense might openness in the research process compromise the research. I would like to keep posting about our progress and hopefully this won’t compromise the research. In particular I would welcome any thoughts about any of the questions we have and particularly welcome any references to others who have researched and published in similar areas.

Before finishing this post I am going to do a plug here for staying in Exeter College if you ever go to Oxford.

Exeter College, Oxford

My room was a bit noisy so be sure to ask for a room in a quiet area – or even next to the chapel where you might be treated to a Baroque Music Concert; you might even end up in the Chapel at 4.00 am because of a false fire alarm, as I did

The Chapel, Exeter College, Oxford

but when you walk into breakfast in this setting, everything is forgiven.

Breakfast in Exeter College Dining Hall, Oxford University

Oxford really is an amazing place.

I hope we will be able to show that MOOCs are not immune to rigorous investigation and add to the increasing body of respected research.

The Business Model for MOOCs

Last week I was at the HEA/SEDA day conference in Birmingham, UK

HEA/SEDA Conference on OER and Staff Development: Open Horizons: Sharing the future

I was there with my colleagues George Roberts, Marion Waite and Liz Lovegrove  because we had a slot in which we shared the work we have done on the FSLT12 MOOC. George has posted his slides to Slideshare.

What is Necessary and what is Contingent in Design for Massive Open Online Courses?

 

You will see that there are a lot of slides (48), but in fact we only got to slide 27 because there was so much interest in the MOOC and so many questions – and of course, so little time for discussion.

However, there was one very interesting, topical and pertinent question, which was,

What was the business model for the FSLT12 MOOC?

And it seems that this question is currently being considered by others on and off the net – see for example the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Inside the Coursera Contract: How an Upstart Company Might Profit From Free Courses

It seems that many institutions think about business models in terms of how much money they can make from MOOCs and certainly Oxford Brookes is thinking of accrediting the MOOC and charging for assessment next year.

But I wonder whether it would be better to think of the benefits and strategic advantages of offering MOOCs in non-direct monetary terms.

I was very interested at the conference in the session presented by Melissa Highton on OERs and Staff Development at University of Oxford. In her presentation she talked about the development of OERs – iTunesU – at the University, what this had involved, how lecturers had been encouraged to share their work and the benefits to Oxford University.

Through their iTunesU open lectures (videos and podcasts) Oxford University now has strong links with their alumni and prospective students. iTunesU thus helps the University to meet many of its institutional goals. The iTunesU site effectively markets and broadcasts the high quality teaching practice at the University and provides access to the expertise of Oxford University lecturers and the latest research.  The University has a quick turn around time for creating and uploading videos of lectures and podcast. For example they were able to upload a response to the Higgs boson discovery within 24 hours.

ITunesU also puts Oxford lecturers and researchers in the limelight. A video of a good lecture can get up to 100,000 hits a week and a lecturer can become widely known for his/her work in a matter of years or less, rather than it taking anything up to a lifetime as in the past. This has also had the effect of raising the status of teaching/lecturing in comparison to research.

The situation at Oxford University (and Cambridge) is different to some other institutions – because at Oxford the lecturers own their teaching materials and work, unlike at other Universities where anything produced by a lecturer as part of their work belongs to the institution. So through iTunesU and providing OERs in the name of the academic staff, the University is able to openly market the expertise of its staff. The reward for staff who do this is a high quality resource in their name which is open to the whole world. Both the institution and the lecturers benefit.

Clearly Oxford University must have the money to be able to produce these high quality OERs so quickly, but these resources are open access, clearly licensed through Creative Commons and free.

Whilst iTunesU is not a MOOC, the non-monetary benefits, or non-direct monetary benefits (since attracting increasing numbers of students from across the world will ultimately bring monetary benefits), are probably those that can be gained from running a MOOC.

Perhaps Universities who wish to run MOOCs need to take a fresh look at what they mean by ‘business model’.

The MOOC Bandwagon

As others have noted – most recently Bon Stewart in her Inside Higher Ed article  – everyone seems to be jumping on the MOOC bandwagon at an alarming rate.

This week the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK ) has jumped on it with a webinar entitled

What is a MOOC – JISC Webinar 11-07-12

Four speakers were invited. Here is the programme and here is the recording
12.00 Definitions of MOOCs (Martin Weller)
12.10 Tutor perspective (Jonathan Worth)
12.20 Learner perspective (Lou McGill)
12.30 MOOCs and online learning (David White)
12.40 Q&A

Martin Weller presented a useful overview of the history of MOOCs and some thoughtful ideas about the benefits of MOOCs and the associated concerns in relation to Higher Education.

Jonathan Worth told us about his ‘open’ photography course in which he uses Twitter with his students to reach a wider network of experts. I was not sure that this is a MOOC in my terms, although it was clearly an ‘open’ course. It got me thinking about whether using different technologies necessarily means that the course is distributed across different platforms, which according to Stephen Downes is a necessary condition for a MOOC (at least a connectivist MOOC).

Lou McGill is a staunch advocate of the DS106 MOOC, in which she has been a learner and she shared her experience of authentic learning in this MOOC. She is also working with Strathclyde University to research learner experiences in the Change11 MOOC.  I was a participant in Change 11 and was also interviewed by Lou McGill for the research – an interesting experience in which I realized that my understanding of ‘What is a MOOC?’ stems from CCK08, but many, many people who are discussing MOOCs today were not in that MOOC and appear to be coming from a different place.

Dave White pondered on why the Stanford MOOC attracted such large numbers and thought it must be to do with their credibility and brand name. He raised the question of the role of the teacher/facilitator in MOOCs and suggested that this is important if MOOCs are to be inclusive. This is a topic we have been discussing in our review the FSLT MOOC.

These are my reflections as a result of attending this webinar.

There are still plenty of people who have technical difficulties accessing a site like Blackboard Collaborate. We cannot make assumptions that people have the technical equipment or skills to engage in MOOCs.

Whilst MOOCs might be the new buzzword in Higher Education, there are still plenty of people who have never heard of them, only just heard of them, have no idea what they are, or who completely misunderstand what they are.

The original connectivist principles of MOOCs are getting lost in the plethora of offerings which now bear the name MOOC, e.g.

• CCK08 (the original MOOC) was an experiment in getting people to think about learning differently;

• the idea was that learners could be in control of their learning and meet in learning spaces of their own choice  according to the principle of distributed environments (see slide 33 in this presentation by Stephen Downes) and see his LMS vs PLE video

• learners would experience learning in the massiveness of the network – so they would not be able to rely on the tutor/convener/facilitator – instead they would need to make connections and seek peer support. In the light of this our understanding of the relationship between teacher and learner would need to change

• the purpose of learning in a MOOC would be to create knowledge and artefacts through exposure to a diverse network, rather than have it centrally provided. This would, through the aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward of resources shared and created, enrich the learning experience

• MOOCs were never intended – despite the name – to be ‘courses’ ( see this blog post  and this response from Stephen Downes ); they were intended to be a challenge to the traditional notion of a course – in the form of learning events. If they don’t do this then they are ‘open courses’ (with some of the attributes of MOOCs), but not MOOCs in the terms of how they were originally conceived.

This is my understanding of what is meant by MOOC – now renamed (in the light of different interpretations) a connectivist MOOC. Many of the most recent courses which have been called MOOCs are not MOOCs in these terms, but fall somewhere along the continuum from connectivist MOOCs with these principles, to the Stanford AI type of centrally located MOOC (see Stephen Downes’ LMS vs PLE video for an explanation)

It is evident that there is room for all these different types of MOOCs or ‘open courses’.   But I hope we will not lose the principles of the CCK08 type of connectivist MOOC, as it is the connectivist MOOCs that are really pushing against the boundaries and challenging traditional ways of thinking about teaching and learning, which is of course why many people feel uncomfortable with them and why we are now seeing efforts to somehow tie them down and bring them into line.

The Case for SmOOCs

On reflection #fslt12 was a SmOOC – a small open online course. I suspect that just as the number of Massive Open Online Courses of the Stanford type will proliferate – at least in the short term – so too will SmOOCs.

SmOOCs have a lot going for them, principally in terms of the relationship between size, diversity and openness.

We had 151 people register for FSLT12 and 168 register for the Moodle site.  Canada, USA, South America, Africa, Europe, India, the Far East and Australia were all represented and at the time of writing 60 people have accessed the Moodle site within the last 3 weeks. We haven’t yet examined the data in any detail, so these are just rough estimates and we don’t know how many people accessed the Moodle site as a Guest. We had 28 people add their blog to the course WordPress site, but again we don’t yet know how many people blogged about the course, without aggregating their blog.  12 people completed the assessment activities.

So in my terms, compared to some of the MOOCs I have been involved with, this was a small MOOC.

As a result of this experience, my perception is that in SmOOCs, ‘openness’ is safer. It was interesting to observe this in FSLT12, which was open enough to ensure diversity, but small enough to ensure that ‘cliques’ didn’t form and that there was a very good mix between novice and experienced participants, different ages, disciplines and cultures. This in itself is interesting, as in the early days of MOOCs it was thought that large numbers were required for diversity. I have thought about and discussed this before – see

Mooc principles and course design

Change 11- massiveness and diversity

For me the question remains as to how massive does a MOOC have to be to hit the ‘sweet spot’ of diversity and openness. In 2012 Roy Williams, Sui Fai John Mak and I published a paper about the Ideals and Reality of Participating in a MOOC, where some of these tensions were discussed.

In FSLT12 I was surprised at how much diversity there can be in a much smaller MOOC – and equally surprised at how this did not lead to sub groups or cliques but to an apparent genuine desire to interact with this diversity.  In past MOOCs I have been involved with it has been the different cultures and resources that have offered the diversity, but in this MOOC, although it was enriched by different cultures, it was the mix of experts and novices that worked so well. This was particularly evident in the microteaching activity where both novices and experts engaged, supported and learned from each other. My feeling is that this was made more possible because of the smaller numbers and also because the smaller numbers made the learning spaces (Moodle and Blackboard Collaborate) feel more intimate, supportive and safe.

So I can see that SmOOCs can offer diversity with relatively ‘safe’ opportunities for connectivity, interaction, autonomy and openness, but do they avoid ‘group think’? This is something that I need to think more about.

#fslt12 MOOC – first reflections

Tomorrow we have our first Review Meeting – we being the team – about the FSLT12 MOOC experience. There is every intention to run the MOOC again next year. I think the intention is to offer it for credit. I may not be involved next year – but whether or not this is the case it is worth thinking about lessons learned from this first offering of #fslt12.

(Click on the image to enlarge it)

I thought it would be useful to make a note of these lessons that I have learned before tomorrow’s meeting, i.e. before being influenced by the others.

Overall, my perception is that the MOOC was a success, although I haven’t seen any of the evaluations yet. Feedback in blogs and in Blackboard Collaborate has been positive – but of course this is only the feedback from those who participated, not from the many who didn’t. It is almost impossible to reach the people who registered but then didn’t visibly interact. We don’t know whether they were ‘lurking’ or simply not there. And if not there, why did they sign up and then not engage?

For me it has been a wonderful opportunity to be ‘on the other side of the fence’ – so to speak, i.e. working with Oxford Brookes to convene the MOOC, rather than be a participant. I have been a participant in five other MOOCs before this one. What have I learned from working in this one as a convener?

–       First – it is a lot of hard work – so hats off to Stephen Downes, George Siemens and Dave Cormier who started all this off. I hadn’t realized that despite the ‘hands off’ approach that they appear to adopt, quite how much hard work goes on behind the scenes. I would imagine that this was particularly so for CCK08 and that is maybe why they changed the format slightly for subsequent MOOCs.

–       Having a good handle on the technology is absolutely essential. In a recent Slideshare presentation Stephen wrote that his law of MOOCs is that if connectivity is not distributed then it is not a MOOC . But this requires a degree of technical expertise that cannot be taken for granted. Fortunately for us we had three wonderful technologists – Joe Rosa, who sorted out the Moodle site for us, Sylvia Currie who not only ‘lent us’ her Blackboard Collaborate site, but also managed it all for us and Liz Lovegrove, who uploaded presentations, videos and resources to our Moodle site. And of course George created the WordPress site. So we did encourage distribution of connectivity across different technologies – and in that sense, according to Stephen, we were a MOOC.

–       but we were not a ‘massive’ MOOC and for me this gave it all more of an ‘open course’ feel. Ultimately, after the initial surge of interest, we had the assessed participants and a few non-assessed participants fully interacting in the forums and Blackboard Collaborate. How many others were ‘watching’, I don’t know, but maybe there are some analytics there somewhere that George and Joe have seen. But what I learned from this is that it doesn’t have to be ‘massive’ to ensure diversity. We had a wonderfully diverse mix of learners from experienced to novice, across very diverse disciplines. My perception was that this was an excellent opportunity for novices to learn from experts and for experts to have their eyes opened by the novices. This for me was the most rewarding aspect of the MOOC.

–       I was reminded once again that online, those who are committed to learning put in more than 100% of effort and therefore breadth and depth issues need to be balanced very carefully. In Week 5 Greg Benfield provided some excellent resources on evaluation, but these were not discussed because both assessed and non-assessed participants who were still with us were completely focused on the microteaching activity. On reflection this is no more than you would expect.

–       And I was reminded once again about how hard it is to get assessment right, so that feedback is constructive and leads to further learning. The type of assessment that we were offering was through personalized feedback. This involves developing a relationship with the ‘to be assessed’ participant. For ‘massive’ MOOCs, this simply does not scale up – so there is a lot to learn about how much learners can learn from the Stanford type of MOOC  and ‘mechanised’ feedback, as opposed to the one-to-one type of feedback we offered. Which offers the best learning experience? This would be worthy of a research paper I think.

–       And finally I experienced the troubling thoughts of whether I should be a ‘traditional teacher’ in this MOOC, or whether MOOCs require a different type of interaction. I alluded to this in my last post. What I like about MOOCs as a participant is that I don’t have anyone ‘watching over me’. I can do my own thing. But as a MOOC convener I’m not sure how far my ‘watching over’ responsibility should extend. I have been a teacher (in the traditional sense) my whole working life and I now feel a dilemma between being responsible for the learners I work with and the autonomy that MOOCs promote. I haven’t sorted this out in my own head yet – but I do know that I have played a ‘teacher’ role in this MOOC – which suggests to me that it hasn’t quite fitted with what I perceive a MOOC to be.

–       Finally I learned a lot about working in Blackboard Collaborate – mainly due to Sylvia Currie’s openness in sharing her expertise, but also because I have never before had the opportunity to be a Moderator for so many sessions in a row. This was very valuable and I will probably write another blog post about what I learned in relation to this.

I’m looking forward to our review meeting tomorrow to hear what others think.

Teaching and Learning in #FSLT12

Today has been the last day of the #fslt12 MOOC, at the end of what has felt like an intense week of participants presenting their microteaching activities in Blackboard Collaborate. Without exception these have been impressive and as one of the course conveners it is humbling to work with learners from whom I learn such a lot.  It has been a privilege. The recordings of the microteach presentations, which happened on Wednesday and Friday of this week can be found here  They are well worth watching and listening to.

I have also been so impressed that participants who did not choose to be assessed have entered into this activity and have been willing to present their work and receive feedback from their peers. No matter how experienced or confident we are in our teaching, there is nothing like being peer reviewed to make us take stock and critically reflect on what it is we are doing.

I have also received this evening an email from one of the MOOC participants sending me this link to Carl Rogers’ work. All he said was,

Thought you might like this Jenny.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rogers.htm

.. and I do like it.  I feel a strong sense of resonance with Carl Rogers’ ideas about facilitation and the importance of relationships in teaching and learning. These are ideas that I think I have always aspired to – but recently with the advent of MOOCs, my thinking on this has been challenged – because in MOOCs, at least in connectivist MOOCs, or in massive online MOOCs of the Udacity type, the role of the teacher changes …. and for me it has become difficult to continue to understand what, as a teacher, my relationship with learners should be.

In connectivist MOOCs the role of the teacher changes because of the associated  ‘hands off’ approach to teaching – or at least that is my experience of connectivist MOOCs. In these MOOCs the teacher is a convener of an event or learning environment, where learners learn from each other and co-construct knowledge. Stephen Downes explains his thinking on this in his post The Role of the Educator  This post demonstrates how complex (or even confused) the role of the teacher has become since the advent of MOOCs.

In the Udacity type of MOOC, the scale of these MOOCs means that the teacher is necessarily even more distant. I haven’t had experience of one of these MOOCs yet – but this blog post seems to describe the situation. This post would seem to support the idea that a relationship between teacher  (whoever that might be) and learner (whoever that might be) cannot be denied as an important factor in learning.

For me FSLT12 has been an open course rather than a MOOC.  My main reason for thinking this has been that in it, I have felt myself to be more present as a teacher/facilitator than I would expect to do in a connectivist MOOC or Udacity type massive open online course. That might be because I have been required to assess some participants’ work. And it might also be because I have been involved in the planning of the structure of the course and therefore am at least in part responsible for its success. But probably mostly because I have felt a sense of responsibility, not only for the success of the FSLT12 MOOC, but much more so for the participants’ learning experiences and I know that this sense of responsibility doesn’t quite fit with a connectivist MOOC philosophy. In my past experience of connectivist MOOCs, this sense of responsibility is not overt, if indeed it exists at all. And that’s OK. I haven’t expected anyone to be responsible for me when participating in MOOCs, or that I would have any sort of a relationship with the MOOC convener.

You will gather from this post that I am still confused about the role of the teacher in MOOC environments. I am still thinking all this through – so I would be very interested to hear what others think. For me it’s all a bit of a dilemma. In MOOCs, am I a teacher, or not, and if I am, what kind of a teacher am I? In FSLT12, I have felt like a teacher/facilitator, but I have not thought that FSLT12 is a MOOC – rather an open online course.

#fslt12 Final Week – Microteaching

This week the focus is teaching and the evaluation of teaching.

This #fslt12 course  is based on a course which runs face-to-face at Oxford Brookes University. The First Steps course is an element of the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development’s (OCSLD) HEA accredited Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education (PCTHE).

#fslt12 has been aimed at new lecturers, people entering higher education teaching from other sectors and postgraduate students who teach. But in true MOOC spirit we have also had some very experienced ‘teachers’ join us who have openly shared their experience.

(Click on the image to see it more clearly)

In the face-to-face course the key activity is to ‘microteach’ –  i.e. teach a short 10 minute session to a small group of peers and receive feedback from that group.  In order to try and ensure alignment between the face-to-face course and what is offered online, we are trying out this activity in #fslt12.  On Wednesday and Friday of this week, #fslt12 participants will showcase the teaching sessions they have prepared in the live sessions and receive feedback from their peers.

Click here to enter the Blackboard Collaborate room. (See time zones below)

Wed 20 June – Check your time zone

Frid 22 June –  Check your time zone

I will be able to reflect further on this activity at the end of this week, but it has already raised some interesting challenges.  These include:

• feelings of exposure. I think it’s fair to say that it’s one thing to practise your teaching in front of a small face-to-face group, but quite another to practise openly online in front of anyone and everyone
• 10 minutes. This will also be a challenge face-to-face, but how do you demonstrate your teaching skills in just 10 minutes
• technology. I also think it would be fair to say that however this activity is presented it will involve a greater degree of technology than it’s face-to-face equivalent.

Finally this activity also demands the skills of evaluation from those involved in peer review.

Greg Benfield from Oxford Brookes University has provided some excellent resources this week, which include two audio video presentations in which he introduces the topic of evaluation, reference to key readings and some sample videos for us to use to try out our evaluation skills.

The microteaching activities are beginning to be posted, both by participants who are being assessed and by others, and we expect some more over the next few days. Have a look in the Moodle wiki and on people’s blogs

It promises to be another interesting week.