Teaching in MOOCs:unbundling the roles of the educator

Rebecca Ferguson

Denise Whitelock

Institute of Educational TechnologyThe Open University, UK

design4learning 2014

Massive thousands may sign up

Open no payment is required

Online resources on the Internet

Courses time-bounded cohorts

What are MOOCs?

http://firstyear.futurelearn.com/

Launched September 2013

42 partners; 38 universities

Nearly 400,000 course sign-ups

Over 650,000 registered users

30,638 comments in one discussion

121,965 people joined a single course

Qualitatively different approaches to teaching are

associated with qualitatively different

approaches to learning

Trigwell, Prosser and Waterhouse, 1999

“”

Access for all – supporting inexperienced learners

Fairness and Nature: When Worlds CollideUniversity of Leeds

Educator challenges

We have provided a short video to highlight a few points to help make your learning experience effective and enjoyable. The video includes:

Preparing to learn […]Listening and reflecting […]

Making notes […]Communicating with others

High levels of engagement – managing workload

Good Brain, Bad Brain: BasicsUniversity of Birmingham

Educator challenges

I have been amazed and impressed by the level of interest and input – 1800 of you have posted at least

one comment. If you posted something hoping to get a reply but haven’t then I am sorry, but me and my four mentors have been doing

our best to monitor what’s going on in between doing our usual

activities.

High levels of engagement – potentially overwhelming

Introduction to Forensic ScienceUniversity of Strathclyde

You have been actively engaged in the discussions, which is excellent,

thank you, but with more than 23,000 participants it means that our

responses and comments risk getting lost. One way to ensure we keep in touch with all of you is by

sending out our weekly email – like this one

Educator challenges

Data collection

~16,000 words in total

exemplar – not part of the dataset

Coding categories (14)

Each week there are a number of activities that are broken into steps. A step could be a video, an article, a quiz or a discussion. The steps are designed to be completed in order, but you can jump around if you wish.

We're sending yesterday's email again just in case you didn't receive it. We had a temporary glitch which has now been fixed and everything is working fine. Apologies for any confusion caused.

Hello Rebecca. The course is under way – and I’m delighted that, between you, you’ve already posted over 5,000 comments

Coding process

Arts MOOC

Recommender of resources (blue segment) is a key role for educators in these MOOCs and is the most-coded category in four cases

Computing MOOC

This was one of two MOOCs that had emotional engagement (brown segment) as one of the most-coded categories

Drama MOOC

A very different pattern, with Outliner (green segment) coded more than on any other MOOC. The educator did not present himself as an Assessor at any point.

Ethics MOOC

Many roles are equally important in this MOOC but, unusually, Outliner is not one of the most-coded categories

Healthcare MOOC

The three educators who signed off the emails consistently presented themselves as Course team members (purple segment)

Marketing MOOC

Although only one educator signed these emails, he regularly presented himself as a Course team member (purple segment)

Dimensions of engagement

Individual Course team member

Learning Group member individual guiding group process

Emotionally engaged aloof

• Identifies possibilities for Educators• Provides a framework for future research