Open Online Courses: Responding to Design Challenges

Terje Väljataga, Hans Põldoja, Mart LaanpereTallinn University, Estonia

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What are open online courses?

MOOC

Massive Open Online Course

Pedagogical design challenges

Creating and sustaining community gravity

• How to design sustainable community gravity?

• What are the mechanisms for bringing and keeping together distributed groups?

• What are the tools and techniques that facilitate and support the emergence of strong community gravity?

Monitoring participation and content flows

• What are the possible technological solutions for both students and facilitators to monitor participation, observe content flows and comprehend the overall course progress?

• How a course design can contribute to support monitoring heterogeneous landscapes of tools and services, student created content and their flows?

Designing materials and activities

• To what extent the material and activities are pre-defined before the course starts?

• To what extent students’ created and recommended activities should be included into this emergent course design?

Providing feedback

• What type of feedback is realistic and required in open courses?

• Who should provide feedback and how often?

• How to increase the quality of feedback given by facilitators and participants?

Multiple case study

Research design

• Multiple cases study method (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2007)

• 3 open online courses

• Focus on 4 design challenges

Three cases

Composing free and open online educational

resources

http://oercourse.wordpress.com

Course design

• Wikiversity for planning and running the course

• Course blog and personal blogs for all participants

• Weekly blog posts and summaries

• Personal introductions

• Blogroll and OPML file for monitoring

• Video conference at the end of the course

Learning environments and learning networks

http://opikeskkonnad.wordpress.com

Course design

• Course blog and personal blogs for all participants

• Weekly blog posts and summaries

• Personal learning contracts

• Four contact days in addition to online activities

• EduFeedr for managing and following the course (Põldoja, 2010)

• Group assignment in addition to blogging

• Good feedback from the facilitators

Social network

Learning & knowledge analytics

http://www.learninganalytics.net

Course design

• The participants were free to decide on their level of participation

• No required assignments

• Moodle forum and Twitter as main communication tools

• Daily summary posts by the facilitators

• Weekly video conferences with external experts

Conclusions

Conclusions

• Open online courses require redesigning the traditional patterns of learning and teaching

• Online tools must be carefully selected to support planned learning activities

• Participants see openness as an opportunity, not as a threat

References

• Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education. New York: T & F Books UK.

• Põldoja, H. (2010). EduFeedr: following and supporting learners in open blog-based courses. In Open ED 2010 Proceedings. Barcelona: UOC, OU, BYU.

Thank You!

Terje Väljataga

terje.valjataga@tlu.ee

http://terjevaljataga.eu

Hans Põldoja

hans.poldoja@tlu.ee

@hanspoldoja

http://www.hanspoldoja.net

Mart Laanpere

mart.laanpere@tlu.ee

@martlaa