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The Pedagogy of MOOCs

This presentation is based on my Pedagogy of MOOCs blog post at:http://edtechfrontier.com/2013/05/11/the-pedagogy-of-moocs

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

2012

The MOOC! The Movie by Giulia Forsythe CC BY-NC-SA

http://nyti.ms/TTn1E7

MOOC Timeline

Figure 1 MOOCs and Open Education Timeline p6.jpg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Are MOOCs a “fad” or should they be taken “seriously”?

2012• Current literature contains references to MOOC-ology and MOOC-ologists!

• What is needed is an analytical approach to describe the spread of a diffusion phenomenon

• Use of Diffusion models to “measure” MOOCs have been traditionally used in the context of sales/adoption forecasting

• Diffusion metaphors are often more persuasive than numerical data, analytical models, and formal reasoning (Eccles & Nohria, 1993)• Rogers’ S-curve• Gartner Group’s “Hyper Cycle”• Investment Bubble Phases

Rogers’ S-curve

Illustrates diffusion rates over time

Gartner Group Education “Hype Cycle”

MOOC’s Hype Cycle

The Pedagogy of MOOCs

How can you effectively teach thousands of students simultaneously?

There is a contrast between post-secondary faculty and K-12 teacher contract agreements that limit class size and the current emergent MOOC aim of having as many enrollments as possible. What a dichotomy.

How well are MOOC’s doing at successfully teaching students?

Based on MOOCs equally massive dropout rates having teaching and learning success on a massive scale will require pedagogical innovation. It’s this innovation, more than massive enrollments or free that I think make MOOC’s important.

MOOCs reach privileged users

• MOOC population tends to be: • young, well educated, and employed, with a

majority from developed countries. – In developing countries, about 80 percent of the MOOC

students surveyed already held college degrees– Significantly more males than females are taking MOOCs,

especially in developing countries.

• Students’ main reasons for taking a MOOC are advancing in their current job and satisfying curiosity.

– The individuals the MOOC revolution is supposed to help the most — those without access to higher education in developing countries — are underrepresented among the early adopters.

*According to the research paper “The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why?

The Reality of MOOC Participation and Completion • 841,687 people registered for the 17 MOOCs from

Harvard and MIT.• 5 percent of all registrants earned a certificate of

completion.• 35 percent never viewed any of the course materials.• 54 percent of those who “explored” at least half of the

course content earned a certificate of completion.• 66 percent of all registrants already held a bachelor’s

degree or higher.• 74 percent of those who earned a certificate of

completion held a bachelor’s degree or higher.• 29 percent of all registrants were female.• 3 percent of all registrants were from underdeveloped

countries.

When building a MOOC remember the audience MOOCs are actually reaching………

• Few of those who sign up for a course end up completing it.

• Most MOOC students already hold traditional degrees.

• Students who sign up for MOOCs are overwhelmingly male.

Always remember when building a MOOC…• You are reaching a completely different set of

students• With different intentions• Different ways of seeing the instructors• Different ways of seeing the content of the course

MOOC Design History

Early MOOCs

http://eci831.ca/

2007Alec Couros

• Open to anyone to participate.

• Some of these early MOOC’s, taught by university faculty, had tuition paying students taking the course for university credit who were joined in the the same class with non-tuition paying, non-credit students who got to fully participate in a variety of non-formal ways. Alec Couros pedagogically designed his graduate course in a way that relies on the participation of non-credit students.

• Other early MOOC’s were solely offered as a form of informal learning open to anyone for free without a for-credit component.

• Openly licensed using Creative Commons licenses

Common Features of Early MOOCs

• The learning focuses on knowledge creation and generation rather than knowledge duplication.

• The course is not conducted in a single place or LMS environment. – It is distributed across the web. We will provide some facilities. – Expectation is that learning activities will be spread over the

internet. – Learning occurs by visits to other people’s web pages, and even to

create some of your own.

• Four key characteristics1. autonomy

2. diversity

3. openness

4. connectedness/interactivity

Pedagogy of cMOOCs

• A connectivist MOOC course is based on four major types of activity 1. Aggregate

2. Remix

3. Repurpose

4. Feed Forward.

• Dave Cormier maps out the five steps to success in a cMOOC – 1. Orient

2. Declare

3. Network

4. Cluster

5. Focus.

• Faculty/facilitators focus on fostering a space for learning connections to occur.

Pedagogy of cMOOCs

Design of cMOOCs

• Learning happens within a network

• Learners use digital platforms such as blogs, wikis, social media platforms to make connections with content, learning communities and other learners to create and construct knowledge.

• Participant blog posts, tweets etc. are aggregated by course organizers and shared with all participants via daily email, newsletter, forum, RSS feed, …

My Twitter Social Ego Networks by David Rodrigues CC BY-NC-SA

Social Learning

• In 2011 MOOC’s migrated to the US with Jim Groom’s DS106 Digital Storytelling at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia.

• DS106 is a credit course at UMW, but you can also be an “open participant“. http://ds106.us

New Pedagogical Directions

• Rather than assignments created by faculty, course assignments are collectively created by course participants over all offerings of the course.

• The Assignment Banks are online and anyone can access it.

• Having course participants collectively build course assignments for use by students in future classes is a hugely significant pedagogical innovation.

http://assignments.ds106.us

MOOCs Go Massive

• Fall of 2011 Stanford Engineering professors offered three of the school’s most popular computer science courses for free online as MOOCs – Machine Learning, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and Introduction to Databases

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered free and online to students worldwide from October 10th to December 18th 2011 was the biggest surprise

• Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig this course really was massive attracting 160,000 students from over 190 countries https://www.ai-class.com

• Pedagogically a step backward

• Design is

– Watch video lecture recordings,

– read course materials,

– complete assignments,

– take quizzes and an exam

Stanford MOOC Pedagogy

The rich pedagogical innovations from earlier MOOC’s•Stanford simply migrated campus-based didatic methods of teaching to the online environment

– Absence of any effort to utilize the rich body of research on how to teach online effectively• didactic, lecture based methods of teaching

does not transfer well to online

Stanford MOOC design left out…..

• Sebastian Thrun leaves Stanford and raises venture capital to launch Udacity

• Mission to bring accessible, affordable, engaging, and highly effective higher education to the world.

https://www.udacity.com

It is interesting to note…..

• Udacity courses include lecture videos, quizzes and homework assignments. – Multiple short (~5 min.) video sections make up each course

unit. – All Udacity courses are made up of distinct units = a week’s

worth of instruction and homework. – Since Udacity enrollment is open, you can take as long as you

want to complete. – Include discussion forums and a wiki for course notes,

additional explanations, examples and extra materials. – Each course has an area where instructors can make

comments but the pedagogical emphasis is on self-study.

Pedagogy (design) of a Udacity MOOC

• Courses do have an informal discussion forum where students can post any ideas and thoughts they have about the course, ask questions, and receive feedback from other students

• Free participation is non-credit • A few courses can be taken for credit (from California

institutions) for a fee and Udacity now requires $150 for a completion certificates

• Udacity offers job placement service in partnership with various employers

Other MOOC model improvements

• Late December 2011 MIT announced edX • Aim of letting thousands of online learners take laboratory-

intensive courses, while assessing their ability to work through complex problems, complete projects, and write assignments.

• October 2013, 76 courses, 29 partners

https://www.edx.org/

• As with other MOOC style offerings edX students won’t have interaction with faculty or earn credit toward an MIT degree.

• For a small fee students can take an assessment which, if successfully completed, will provide them with a certificate from edX.

• edX offers honor code certificates, ID verified certificates, and XSeries certificates (successfully completing a series of courses)

• edX platform used to conduct experiments on how students learn and how faculty can best teach. Assessing course data, from mouse clicks to time spent on tasks, to evaluating how students respond to various assessments.

Pedagogy of edX

• Initial edX aim was to improve teaching and learning of tuition paying on-campus students. Have revised aim to developing best practices to enhance the student experience and improve teaching and learning both on campus and online

• Pedagogy very similar to Udacity• Regrettably the rich body of research about online

learning is not being used• Focus of edX so far is not on pedagogy but on

engineering an open source MOOC platform

Pedagogy of edX

• April 2012 Stanford computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller launch Coursera as an educational technology company offering MOOCs.

• Oct 2013 have 5,112,216 Courserians, 461 courses, and 91 partners

• Video lectures, mastery learning, and peer assessment.

• Retrieval and testing for learning. Interaction = the video frequently stops, and students are asked to answer a simple question to test whether they are tracking the material.

• Coursera provides university partners with a flipped classroom. MOOC handles the lecture, course reading, some assessment & peer-to-peer interaction for campus-based tuition paying students. On-campus activities focused more on active learning & instructor help.

• Non-tuition paying open participants have no active learning component. Students are tossed a tidbit of social learning in the form of discussion forums.

Pedagogy of Coursera

• Completing learners - attempt the majority of the assessments offered in the class

• Auditing learners - attempt assessments infrequently, if at all but watch lectures throughout the course

• Disengaging learners - attempt assessments at the beginning of the course but then move to sparsely watching lectures or disappear from the course entirely

• Sampling learners - briefly explore the course by watching a few videos, either at the beginning of the course or while it is underway

• No Shows - enroll but never actively engage with any of the course materials (study indicated 30-43%) ref: Schneider, Stanford,

2013

4 Prototypical learners in MOOCs

Design of CHAMP MOOCs

Typical Development HoursHours Purpose

2-10 Creating proposal, consultation with platform support, and basic design overview for the course

5-15 Designing or redesigning the specifics of the instructional approach for the course.

2-4 Logistical planning with platform support and ed. Tech

8 hours for each hour of course content

Content development-identifying, obtaining and creating text, graphics, illustrations, animations, video, music, graphs, charts, etc….to be used in the course

4-5 hours for each hour of course content

Recording the videos (assuming content is developed and the speaker/narrator knows the material)

2 hours for each hour of course content

Post-production for editing recordings, and encoding the project as a playable video

2-3 hours for each hour of course content

Publishing content- gathering and uploading materials, adding quizzes and assignments, creating instructions for students, etc….

MOOC Production

• Create a dynamic course planning document to manage tasks, timelines, work products, upload deadlines

• Include required fields or submission formats of the OER repository (meta data, authors, key words)

• Create single institutional accounts for all collaborators to upload products

• Videos

– Consider accessibility for videos

• transcripts and captioning?

– Find alternatives to YouTube if you anticipate a world wide audience

Are MOOCs Really Open?

No, all rights reserved.

No, non-OER license.

No, all rights reserved.Note: some institutions using CC anyway.

Yes, CC BY or CC BY-SA

Partial, CC BY-NC on some

Most MOOCs are open only in the sense of free enrollment.

No, all rights reserved.

4 essential elements for a successful MOOC:•Autonomy-students decide how much to participate•Diversity-students come from all backgrounds, different countries, different experiences•Openness-MOOCs should be free or of such low costs that nearly anyone can participate•Interactivity-Chats, social networking, video meetings, collaboration

Downes’ MOOC Model

• Learning is not just acquiring a body of knowledge and skills. Learning happens through relationships.

• Online learning pedagogies can be incredibly social even more so than campus-based courses - MOOCs should use this long-standing practice

• The best online pedagogies are those that use the open web and relationship to mine veins of knowledge, expertise, and connections between students, between students and the instructor, and between students and others on the open web.

• Socio-constructivist and connectivist learning theories acknowledge and embrace the social nature of learning.

• Use social learning including blogs, chat, discussion forums, wikis, and group assignments.

Recommendations for MOOC Pedagogy

• Use peer-to-peer pedagogies over self study. We know this improves learning outcomes. The cost of enabling a network of peers is the same as that of networking content – essentially zero.

• Be as open as possible. Use open pedagogies that leverage the entire web not just the specific content in the MOOC platform.

• Use OER and openly license your resources using Creative Commons licenses in a way that allows reuse, revision, remix, and redistribution.

• Leverage massive participation – have all students contribute something that adds to or improves the course overall.

Recommendations for MOOC Pedagogy

Platform

•Functions, assets, limitations

•Training for instructors

Communication during course

•Platform info, FAQ’s, how tos

•Student Communication: email? discussions?

•Clarify level of communication that students can expect

•Clarify who to contact for what

•Clarify typical daily/weekly hours spent in the MOOC

•Meetups, office hours?

•Trouble reports

MOOC Development

Course norms & expectations•Honor Code – does the course have one or does your institution require one•Visibility – what is public/private? Open to enrollees? Access to student work? Access to scores/assessments?•Intellectual Property – who owns what (students, all, instructors) licensing?•Citing external resources – provide expectations & resources•Promote & model positive communications - plan for handling negative communication•Prevent & response to cases of students using the OPEN platform to take advantage of others or furthering individual interests

MOOC Development 2

Instructional Goals

•“reach vs. rigor”

Syllabus

•Design to include global and online environmental considerations

•Schedules

Reading Assignments

•Will reading be assigned? If so, is ALL reading free and available online?

•If using scholarly articles not available online, what is the copyright, distribution, & cost to students

•Consider availability of book reading assignments due to international enrollment

Assessments and Surveys

•Assignments and Assessments

– Number?

– Grading? Peer review?

•Surveys

– What info will be collected? What are the goals for collecting data?

– Factor in attrition rates and end-of-course biases

MOOC Development 3

Course Promotion•Map out audiences•Prepare blurbs•Reach out to relevant blogs & news sources•Reach out via social media

– Course pages on Twitter, Facebook, Google+

– Who will set up, manage, post?•Coordinate with communications department

MOOC Delivery 2

Four Barriers That MOOCs Must Overcome To Build a Sustainable Model

Phil Hill http://mfeldstein.com/four-barriers-that-moocs-must-overcome-to-become-sustainable-model

Need pedagogically based business models.

Practical Institution Recommendations

• Organize an inter-disciplinary group/committee to evaluate MOOC options and recommend a particular MOOC provider/platform

• Define purpose of doing MOOCs• Design a MOOC pedagogical strategy• Initial MOOCs may come from academic areas

already engaged in online learning – commerce, medicine, …

• Alternatively MOOCs could showcase courses that highlight what makes instituion special and unique

Conclusions

MOOC Phenomenon has created dialogues:•Value of OER•Strategies to address the rising cost of higher education•“Just in time” learning•Learning for professional development, distant, and continuing education•Benefiting from “crowdsourcing” education with group learning, peer to peer, peer to instructor, instructor to instructor

Employability Skills for Industry MOOC

• Description: – Employability skills are those basic skills necessary for getting, keeping, and doing well on a job. Entry-level

employees with good personal skills have confidence in themselves and deal with others honestly and openly, displaying respect for themselves, their co-workers, and their supervisors regardless of other people’s diversity and individual differences. They view themselves as a part of a team and are willing to work within the culture of the group. They have a positive attitude and take the initiative to learn new things to get the job done. They also have the ability to set goals and priorities in their work and personal lives so that resources of time, money and other resources may be conserved and managed. These individuals practice good personal habits, come to work as scheduled, on time and dressed appropriately, and are agreeable to change when necessary. This MOOC will help identify those skills you have and those skills you may need to work on so you can do well in industry jobs.

• Target Dates:– *Review 1: August 18, 2014– * Open for enrollment on canvas.net: August 25, 2014– * Review 2: September 15, 2014– * Start date: October 20, 2014– * End date: December 1, 2014