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.

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.

#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.

Open Educational Resources and Pedagogy

Dave White’s presentation to FSLT12 yesterday included a number of thought-provoking ideas.

In the past I have heard Dave speak a number of times about ‘Visitors and Residents’ in the online environment. You can find out more about this on his TALL blog – Technology Assisted life-long learning – TALL for short  (his joke – not mine :-))

But this week’s talk took a different focus. It centred on the relationship between open educational resources (OERs), open academic practice and changing pedagogy. The title of his talk was even longer than this:

OER: The quality vs credibility vs access vs pedagogy vs legitimacy vs money debate

Click here for the recording of the session.

As Dave pointed out, OERs come in all shapes and sizes and Creative Commons  licensing of these is very important in determining our use of them.  But despite being in all shapes and sizes, we can take the iceberg metaphor and categorise them as

• those above the water-line, visible, above board, properly licensed – the kind of resources produced by an institution to market itself
• or those below the water line – where licensing is not so important.

These below the water line resources are easy access , free and easy to remix and repurpose, without much attribution.  This happens a lot below the water line.

(Slide 6 from Dave White’s presentation)

But perhaps the most important point/question raised by Dave is 

What effect has access to OERs, above or below the water line, had on the way we teach and learn?

I remember when MIT first opened access to their educational resources, this was accompanied by a statement to the effect that it was not an issue for them to open their content to the world – because the educational value and quality they provide is not so much in their content, but in their teaching and learning. To get this we have to pay to go to MIT.

So as Dave said, when thinking about OERs we cannot neglect ‘contact’. It is not all about ‘content’. So how do OERs ‘drive pedagogy back into what it’s meant to be’? (quoting Dave from the presentation). For me they do this in a number of ways:

• They release the teacher/tutor/lecturer/ facilitator from the ‘tyranny of content’.  I have written about this in the past

• Now that we have more clarity around what we are allowed to do with OERs (through Creative Commons Licences), we can remix, repurpose and feed-forward OERs (to quote Stephen Downes). We can be more creative.

• Perhaps OERs also enable us to challenge the ‘status quo’ – in the sense that ‘credible, quality’ content might no longer always be in peer reviewed journals, articles and academic sites, but might instead be on ‘John or Jane Doe’s blog’ or deep below the water line (iceberg metaphor).

• They do tend to force more critical thinking and the framing of critically relevant questions, e.g. what is a credible, quality resource? How do we recognize it?  And this in turn raises the whole question of whether learners have the skills to navigate the web to find the quality resources.

• And from the teacher’s perspective, as Dave pointed out, we will have to come up with assessment tasks that don’t allow the student to simply find the answer through an easy access easy to find OER. This has always been a challenge for teachers, but even more so now.

Dave’s final slide quotes Harouni (2009).

“I must value not answers but instead questions that represent the continued renewal of the search. I must value uncertainty and admit complexity in the study of all things”

For me living with uncertainty is the big paradigm shift we might need in today’s digital world. Roy Williams, Regina Karousou, Simone Gumtau and I have been exploring this in our papers about emergent learning  – and Dave Cormier raised this as a key point in his presentation to the in the ‘New Places to Learn’  – NewPlacesEvent HEA event held at the Said Business School in Oxford in April of this year.

Hopefully discussion about how OERs affect pedagogy will continue in the FSLT12 Week 4 Moodle discussion forum  There is still lots to talk about.

The Benefits and Risks of Academic Openness

 

Yesterday Frances Bell made a presentation to FSLT12 MOOC on

The role of Openness by Academics in the Transformation of their Teaching and Learning Practices

This was a thought provoking session. Frances didn’t throw content at us, tell us what to think or how to think, but challenged our thinking with the questions

• How can openness benefit my practice?
• What risks are presented by open academic?
• What impact is your participation in #fslt12 having on your personal network?
• What role can openness play in learners’ practice?

Of course there are no right or wrong answers to these questions. It’s all a matter of perception. Frances states

I prefer to think of openness as a default option that can be turned off, not as a zealot’s precept

But when  I recently wrote a blog post raising the question (in response to a post by George Veletsianos)…..

Is openness becoming a ‘tyranny’ that we are all just drifting into? Or is openness essential to the future of education and scholars?

…. Stephen Downes emphatically responded ‘Yes’ it is essential to the future of education and scholars’, but ‘No’ it is not becoming a tyranny. He feels that we have the autonomy to decide whether to be open or not and writes

First, nobody’s imposing anything here; if you want to go back to your structured formal education, where you pay a substantial fee, there are thousands of institutions who would be happy to help you. Second, the openness (and the rest of it) is the result of a critical examination. As I have argued with respect to the principles of successful networks, if you want your social organizations to be effective at all, you need to embrace things like autonomy, openness, interatcivity and diversity.

This was on the 18^th May and I have been thinking about it since because I have a great deal of respect for Stephen, but for me the answers to the questions are less clear cut.  I think in the context of Higher Education the problem is that we are in structured formal education, where, if we want to keep our jobs, we sometimes do have to conform to the institution’s requirements – and that may or may not include a requirement for openness. I should say here that I am not in this situation (I am an independent consultant), but I have been in the past and I know from experience that resistance to an institution’s principles might mean handing in your notice, which is probably not an option for many people – although I have done this twice in the past, and fortunately on both occasions was able to move straight into another job. So I think in certain circumstances, openness could be imposed if you do not have the autonomy to resist it.

But I do agree with Stephen that openness is the result of critical examination – which I think fits with Frances’ statement that openness can be thought of as a default option. As she said in today’s session it will not be for everyone in every situation. We each, individually need to decide how open to be, when and where.

So what might be the benefits? I know that the benefits can be considerable, although I think I benefit more from others’ openness than being open myself. I get access to free information and a wide range of alternative perspectives. More importantly I receive support and encouragement from people I may not even have met. People’s generosity through openness on the web and indeed in this FSLT12 MOOC never fails to amaze me.

But I am equally aware of the risks. Openness necessarily means a certain degree of exposure. For introverts and private people in particular this can be difficult. I think I’m in this category. For novices it may be even more difficult. As Stephen says, we don’t have to be open. We can choose not to be. But first we have to have the freedom to make this choice and second we have to have the skills to weigh up what is gained and what is lost by being open or not open, what we should be open about and what we should keep to ourselves – and then of course we need to decide who to be open with – the whole worldwide web, or just a small working team? As Frances has said in the Moodle discussion forum

I really don’t understand why anyone would want to be open (different from honest in that we can choose not to say certain things) all the time – some remarks are better kept from the public gaze.

Openness is not straightforward. It clearly means different things to different people according to their context and it may be something that we cannot take a stance on in the moment. I suspect it may take considerable experience and time to determine what openness means on a personal level and how that understanding will be reflected in our personal practice.

Blog Aggregation

As with other MOOCs, the #fslt12 MOOC offers blog aggregation

From my perspective this has been one of the most difficult aspects of organizing the technologies we are using for this MOOC. How should we do the aggregation and where should the aggregation appear? Ultimately the decision was to aggregate the blog feeds into our WordPress home site. I wasn’t involved in setting it up, but I have been interested in the discussions around what to do and how to do it.

I have been aware for some time of Stephen Downes’ grsshopper aggregator which he openly shares in detail, but recently I have become aware of the Planet Aggregator .

I have also been very interested in the work that Gordon Lockhart  has been doing on scraping blog comments

In the past six weeks I have been participating (as a mentor) in  CPsquare’s   Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop. This is a community of practice on communities of practice. I have been a member since 2007 when I was a participant in the Workshop. Part of the workshop experience is to work for two weeks with other participants on a project of your choice. This year one of the participants, Mel Chua was keen to try out the Planet Aggregator to pull in blog posts about communities of practice or which reference CPsquare.  This is where the project has got to: Demo site

This project has raised some very interesting issues, most notably the issue of tagging. We didn’t want to pull in authors, so much as the posts that relate to communities of practice of specific authors . Obviously people blog about a variety interests, some of which wouldn’t be relevant to this blog stream.

We discovered that some people don’t use tags at all, even if they write good posts on communities of practice.  Others (me included) are inconsistent in their use of tags or use a variety of tags to represent posts on communities of practice. So discussions at the moment are around whether or not only ‘invited’ people can submit their blog to the aggregator and then whether they should be required to use a given tag, for their blog to appear in the stream.

This has led to a further discussion about boundaries. CPsquare has a ‘permeable’ boundary. It has some aspects of it’s work ‘open’ to the world such as it’s wiki and it’s website , but it also has a private members area where there are ongoing private conversations. Members pay a membership fee.  So the question has been whether any of those conversations should appear on the aggregated blog stream, or whether only members should be invited to submit their blogs to the stream. I think the idea is that the stream will include ‘trusted’ friends who write about CoP related issues, but are not necessarily paid up members of the community.

The suggestion from Mel has been that CPsquare will need a ‘planetmaster’ to manage the invitation of subscribers.

Although a lot of hard work has gone into looking through members’ blogs for relevant tags and categories, Mel and John Smith (community steward for CPsquare) seem to have been able to set up a demo site in a relatively short space of time – so it would seem that aggregation of blogs might be easier in the future – maybe even for non-technical people like me?

#fslt12 MOOC – Week zero – discussion has started

The discussions in the FSLT Moodle site  are  beginning to get going and quite a few people are already blogging or setting up their blogs.

We have set up an Arrivals Lounge  where people can introduce themselves. And there is also a Course Questions forum, where we will try to answer any queries as soon as we can.

But in  the  Week 0 (Supporting Learning) area of Moodle (which is this run up week to the course), George has posted a great question to get us warmed up – ‘What is Learning for you’ and provided an audio introduction to go with it. Allan Quartly has pointed us to a blog post that he made last year

Like Allan, I feel as though this is a question I have asked myself before.

My thinking on this has been influenced by the work of Etienne Wenger – and his book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity  and here  Etienne lists the key principles of learning that he outlines in his book. (Etienne and his wife Bev will be speaking to the FSLT MOOC on Wed 6th June)

I have also been influenced by the work of Stephen Downes who says that to learn is to practice and reflect  and that learning is about recognising patterns

 

(Slides taken from – http://www.slideshare.net/Downes/the-meaning-is-the-message)

And much of my recent thinking about learning has been related to the work I have been doing on emergent learning and embodied learning

So when I think about learning I tend to think more about process than product.  I don’t forget that Etienne has said that said that ‘learning is a claim to competence’ but more important for me learning is (as Ronald Barnett discusses in depth in his book ‘A Will to Learn’ ) the continuing process of ‘learning to learn’ and (through this) ‘becoming’ who I am and developing an understanding of my ‘being’.

Barnett writes on p.62 of his book

‘In a genuine higher education, the student not merely undergoes a developmental process, but undergoes a continuing process of becoming. This becoming is marked by the student’s becoming authentic and coming into herself ….. She discovers her own voice, is able to articulate it and deploys it to effect. She brings to bear not just her own intentionalities, but her own will. She not just is carried forward, but carries herself forward.’

My thinking is that this applies to all learners – not just students. We are all learners, are we not?

Where do scholars reside?

Week 27 in ChangeMOOC showed us what a Scholar in Residence gets up to. Antonio Vantaggiato shared the work he started as Scholar in Residence at New York University last summer. This work focuses on exploring the myths surrounding teaching, learning and technology. These are listed in this index – http://zenofteaching.us/2012/03/07/the-index/ and explored further in his slideshare presentation  and associated live presentation .

The work is a ‘book in progress’ on unpicking the myths. Antonio Vantaggiato is sharing his writing on his website  In his words:

The site is done with digress.it, which allows for discussion on each paragraph of the text, and this is what I hope would emerge as a product of participant’s work.

It is by no means an academic, or well-structured research work, but more of a popular discussion. I am using almost no journal or conference papers, but instead, articles from popular media. Plus, the interviews I am conducting (hope to count on you guys in the next future!) add to the ideas elaborated and to the site itself.

I plan to publish in the next weeks the latest interviews (I got Shirky already up, and this week I’ll have another interview done with Mikhail Gershovich, Luke Waltzer, Tom Harbison etc. at Baruch College, etc.)…

Perhaps even more intriguing, at this point than the discussion of the myths – is this way of working, not only because it is being done in the ‘open’, but also because of the departure from the use of journal and conference papers. So the process of writing the book is also an attempt to debunk some of the myths around what constitutes acceptable publications in the bubble of higher education. Presumably Antonio hopes to publish this book when it has been completed – or will the website be the book. I was interested that Stephen Downes regards his website as his book.

So will future scholars reside more on their websites rather than institutions of higher education?

The philosophy of MOOCs

There are currently lots of blog posts around, asking yet again ‘What is a MOOC?’ and about the different types of MOOCs  –  see for example

Osvaldo Rodriguez blog

George Siemens’ Elearnspace blog

Stephen Downes’ Half and Hour site

John Mak’s Blog

MOOCs are even being discussed on a German blog which I could only access through a translation. Unfortunately since I do not speak German,  I was not able to participate in the discussion in the comments.

All these discussions are very relevant to my current situation in which I am working with George Roberts and Marion Waite of Oxford Brookes University to plan a new MOOC for May/June – First Steps into Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

The first question in my recent post about planning MOOCs – was ‘What is a MOOC’? and there was another question for planning a MOOC (Slide 7) about deciding on ‘What kind of MOOC”? They sound such simple questions, but the discussions on the web have shown that they are not easy to answer.

I am clear in my own mind what a MOOC is for me – but I also know that others interpret it differently. I tend to agree with Matthias Melcher that the original idea of MOOC is becoming watered down and now MOOCs seem to be all things to all people. Even those who have never participated in a MOOC feel qualified to comment (just as those who have never qualified as teachers feel qualified to comment on how to teach). Stephen Downes has ‘shrugged’ his shoulders and said this is inevitable.

For me a MOOC is what CCK08 offered and succeeding MOOCs designed on similar principles offer.  Yes it was a massive, open, online course – but it was also more than that. It offered a new and explicit perspective on learning in the 21^st century.  The other day I found myself saying a MOOC is one thing but the Stanford AI course  is just a massive open online course. Wow – how bizarre does that sound, but maybe people who recognize the CCK08 philosophy understand what I mean.

For me a MOOC is not simply a massive, open, online, course – it is based on the explicit principles of connectivism – the principles of autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity – which we have shown through research  are not easy principles to aspire to or achieve. It is also based on the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward the resources  and learning that are part of the MOOC experience.  A MOOC design, in the terms that I am describing it, also takes a specific stance on the relationship between teacher and learner – a stance in which the word ‘teacher’ might be considered redundant.

In a way it’s a shame that the term ‘MOOC’ was coined.  On the one hand it is good that it is a term that has attracted a lot of attention (both negative and positive), which at least means that educators are beginning to think about the extent to which traditional approaches to teaching and learning might need to change.   On the other hand, all the MOOC variations that are being spawned may have resulted in a blurring of the original intention and meaning. That’s not to say that other open online courses, even other massive open online courses don’t have value. If the success (in terms of numbers attending and completing the course) of the Stanford AI course is anything to go by then they obviously do. But the original MOOC had a clear well defined philosophy, which was a break from traditional ways of working and was designed to address the issues that anyone working in education has to deal with in relation to the global changes in connectivity, information sharing and knowledge creation that we are seeing in current times. I hope the principles on which CCK08 was founded will not get lost in this variation.

What new term could we come up with which would keep the original MOOC philosophy intact and distinct from the many variations of MOOCs that are now being created, if indeed it is important to do this?