ICTlogy

A MOOC Revolution? Strategic Considerations and Lessons Learned
Chair: Anni Soborg, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Amy Woodgate, University of Edinburgh, UK

6 courses (wave 1) + 8 courses (wave 2) + more (circa 30 a year). Broad subject areas. Fully online, free to take, OER licensed with CC.

MOOCs implicitly aimed at capacity building for the faculty, to know what it’s out there, to exchange knowledge, to see “what is out there”.

Achievements:

• Small amount of direct income to reinvest into MOOC development.
• Capacity building on online learning
• Knowledge exchange
• development of new online delivery methods
• Research outputs; strengthened the University’s development areas.
• Lots of fun.

Goals:

• Get to new audiences.
• Respond to an external need.
• Widen participation.
• Showcasing Edinburgh’s strengths.
• Pedagogical innovation.

Usage of the MOOC:

• Research.
• Capacity.
• Materials.

What have we learned

• MOOCs themselves have no business models: you have to attach one to them, if you want to.
• Best things are built and grown together.
• Academic staff need multi-dimensional support.
• Digital literacies should never be assumed.
• The power of fun should never be underestimated.

Trine Sand, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Why join a MOOC platform?

• Better education.
• Sharing knowledge.
• International recruitment.
• Continuing education.
• Platform to highlight UCPH research.

How to get started? Have a keen ambassador to lead the project.

• Steering committee: faculty-based decision-making.
• Coursera unit: platform and production experts, pilot project and assessment of the pilot project.
• University Education Services: political context and overall UCPH strategies.

A MOOC is a perfect tool for going international.

Profile: 268,868 learners; 40% full time employed; 60% with BA or MA degree; North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

MOOCs have the potential to facilitate changes, to reflect on what we are doing.

Rahul Choudaha, World Education Services, USA

Cautions on predictions and choices. What will happen with MOOCs? Embrace or avoid?

Georgia Tech, Udacity and AT&T issued an Online Master of Science in Computer Science that blended a degree with a MOOC. It was the regular degree, online, and at 10% its cost.

Strategy renders choices about what not to do as important as choices about what to do.

Discussion

Q: evolution or revolution? Woodgate: more an evolution than a revolution [IMHO she’s talking about xMOOCs and definitely not about cMOOCs.

Q: what is the cost of the MOOC? Sand: it has a cost, but it is an investment, not an expenditure. But yes, a good amount of money is involved, especially if you take into account the cost of the lots of time that people put into the course.

Q: how do you manage admissions? Woodgate: we distinguished students from learners. Learners just freely access (and follow) the MOOC for the sake of it. If you want credit, and you will pursue assessment, then you’re a student, and you will have to go through the usual admissions process. Sand: both models, MOOC and regular degrees, are not mixed. They both have their own processes, channels, platforms, etc.

Q: how do you know the person that took the test is the one that they say they are? Woodgate: the certificate at the end is just a statement of a completion of a course, not a “real” certificate. We sacrificed the obtention of a “real” certificate in benefit of other aspects: easing access, promoting engagement and exchange, etc.

Some weeks ago I was contacted by a doctoral student who is doing her dissertation on MOOCs. She was sending along a questionnaire on how to define and characterize MOOCs to which I had hard times to answer. The reason was not that the questions were specially difficult, but that the answers had very different mileage depending on whether you had in mind cMOOCs or xMOOCs. The feeling was not new: every time I read on the news something about MOOCs or have a conversation among colleagues on the topic, the difference (the huge differences) between the two models make any judgement difficult until some quite major clarifications are made.

As the questions from the doctoral student where appropriate, I thought I would take the chance, in answering them, to stress how cMOOCx differ from xMOOCs and, consequently, what a good idea would be to split up one model from the other one. My intention is far from aiming at coining a new term — there already exists even a taxonomy with 8 types of MOOC by Donald Clark — but reflecting on these differences and, in some way, extend the excellent work by Li Yuan, Stephen Powell and Bill Olivier at Beyond MOOCs: Sustainable Online Learning in Institutions.

Here, thus, comes the questionnaire and my answers:

A questionnaire about MOOCs

1. How would you define a MOOC?

It depends.

xMOOCs are self-learning courses supported by a minimum technological infrastructure for the distribution of learning materials and, sometimes, to enable a certain student-to-student interaction. In my opinion, most of them are not much more than that.

cMOOCs are self-learning communities, initiated by a person or a group of persons with knowledge and experience on a topic, and addressed to the rest of the community of interest so that new knowledge is built collectively with the support of decentralized leadership and the convergence of ideas.

2. What are the main characteristics of MOOCs?

It depends.

Most xMOOCs are just like an online course but without support or facilitation. Or are just a learning material with, sometimes, a platform for the exchange of opinions and judgements.

cMOOCs have a distributed leadership, they use totally decentralized technology and platforms, with a certain or minimum coordination (either methodological or technological) that, once it is established, usually steps aside and out of the front line of the learning action.

3. What would you consider are the benefits of MOOCs in comparison with other distance learning or e-learning modalities

It depends.

Most xMOOCs are, in my opinion, a step backwards (or, in the best scenario, just staying in the very same place) in relationship to other learning modalities. Only in very exceptional cases, and compared with very basic modalities, they suppose and advancement if they succeed in creating a dynamic and live learning community.

cMOOCs, in my opinion, are a leap forward. They imply putting the student in the centre of the learning action, make them aware and be part of the design and initiative of the learning action, make them reflect about that learning process and about the goals to be achieved (goals that, indeed, they are often changing). The MOOC makes reality the old motto of “learning to learn” as it makes real the creation of communities of learning and/or practice that, luckily, will stay with the learning for a long time (as long as their learning to learn lasts).

4. What would you consider are the main limitations of MOOCs?

It depends.

Most cMOOCs have as a main limitation the lack of facilitation, at least quality facilitation. Which, at its turn, implies other limitations that are the consequence of the former: highest drop out rates, disaffection, insecurity on the accomplishment of the learning goals, etc.

cMOOCs have as the main limitation that they usually take for granted that the learner masters three skills which are, the three of them, very demanding:

• A certain level (usually high) of knowledge on the topic to be dealt with.
• A certain digital competence, the higher the more decentralized is the course.
• A certain interest in matters of learning methodologies so that they can perform the implicit metaanalysis of a course of this kind.

If each and every one of these three factors is already excluding on its own, the confluence of the three of them is quite often an insurmountable barrier.

5. How do you think the main limitations of MOOCs could be addressed?

It depends.

Most xMOOCs, in my opinion, should evolve towards already established modalities which have proven their efficacy, with facilitators that guide the student and scaffold their learning process.

cMOOCs should do an effort to increase the granularity of the levels of decentralization, individualization, autonomy, digital competence, pedagogical reflection, etc. so that it is possible to design a gradation of MOOCs that go from less “cMOOC-intensive” (and, thus, closer to more traditional modalities) to more “cMOOC-intensive” levels or “pure-cMOOCs” to benefit from all the possibilities of the model. This granularity with surely imply a trade-off with the “purity” of the MOOC, either with more centralization, more scheduling, more support or facilitation to students, more technological pre-setting, etc.

6. What role do you think MOOCs have?

Now focussing only on cMOOCs (I guess it is now clear that I believe that xMOOCs are, in reality, self-learning without a course), in my opinion cMOOCs are the great excuse to rethink the increasingly more blurry frontier between formal education and informal, non-formal and autodidactic learning.

And, with it, to rethink the role of traditional educational institutions before the institutions whose mission is not educating, but that in whose performance they end up being excellent learning platforms themselves (firms, among others).

7. Please state the degree of agreement with the following statements ranging from totally disagree to totally agree:

(this question is being answered in relationship with cMOOCs, totally leaving xMOOCs aside).

8. Other considerations that you may want to add.

I consider essential, in any analysis about MOOCs, to split up cMOOCs from xMOOCs: they are too different to be treated altogether.

Regarding the question “Comptetences acquired and developed in the framework of a MOOC sould be evaluated” I do not think this question should be related to any modality of learning action in particular, but related to the purposes that led someone to develop and follow a specific learning action.

That is, the decision whether to evaluate lies, in my opinion, outside of the modality, and it is framed in the learner’s context, in the learning goals, in the need (or not) for a certification of such evaluation, etc. Thus, I think this is a question that “does not apply”.

Some last notes

The landscape of MOOCs is rapidly evolving. Their horizon is broadening as are the methodologies that lead their design and development… and the business models (or lack of) that lie behind them. Some of them are beginning to be more closed courses than open; some of them are beginning to stress on facilitation; some others on peer-evaluation; etc. By increasing, as I stated before, the granularity of their characteristics, also their types will vary and increase, depending on what characteristics one prioritizes in detriment of other ones.

Some of my statements above may thus be very inaccurate in the medium term for most MOOCs, be them xMOOCs or cMOOCs… as I am fully aware that they already are for some.

So, the important thing, to me, is the following one: if MOOCs are the answer, what was the question? I think that when trying to understand MOOCs it still is more important to identify the correct question rather than focussing on what MOOCs (all of them or some of them) can or cannot do or achieve.

Óscar Becerra has just written The One Laptop Per Child Correlation With Massive Open Online Courses where he compares the OLPC project with MOOC initiatives.

In a nutshell, the Becerra argues that MOOC should not be compared to other higher education initiatives or institutions, but to what MOOCs can bring to “non-users” of education, as the OLPC should be judged not in comparison to schools, but in comparison to “non-schools”, that is, no educational institutions at all.

I mostly agree with the author, but there are some omissions that are very worth being mentioned… as they may place us, at least, in a more sceptic point of view. Or, in other words, nor may MOOCs might be compared with a comprehensive and affordable educational system and neither should the OLPC be compared with the total lack of alternatives.

First of all, it just happens that education is not about the apprehension of content, but about transforming information into knowledge. Or, in other words, education is about empowerment. Quite often forgotten, there are two kinds of MOOCs: connectivist MOOCs (cMOOCs) and non-connectivist MOOCs (xMOOCs). While I find the former empowering, the latter I find them not: just an interesting but mere channel of content distribution. Unfortunately, cMOOCs are rarely dealt with and only xMOOCs are the ones being discussed. Like the article in question. Thus, comparing a non-empowering tool like xMOOCs to a supposedly empowering tool, like the OLPC, is a difficult exercise to do.

Education, empowerment, or development, on the other hand, do not happen in the void, but in a given context. A personal context. A personal starting point. And there is increasing evidence that one’s starting point will tell whether one will improve or worsen one’s situation with a given tool, e.g. laptops or MOOCs. We call this the knowledge gap hypothesis and there are many examples on how public libraries, access to newspapers and information, or laptops in the classroom have a multiplier effect: if you’re in a good position, you’ll do better; if you’re in a bad position, you’re very likely to do worse. So, what is the position of these “non-users” that have now access to the OLPC device or to a (c)MOOC?

Last — and very related with the previous point —, development or empowerment is not only about the existence of individual resources and the possibility to use them, but the personal will or emancipative value to want to use them. Welzel, Inglehart & Klingemann called this the having the objective and the subjective choice of development (to which we have to add effective choice, of course).

Indeed, our last point summarizes the first point (access to MOOCs seen as objective choice) and the second one (the knowledge gap hypothesis as subjective choice).

And there are two common issues in our three points: context and the human factor. Context of the user, both the exogenous context (the socio-economic status, their community, etc.) and the endogenous context (level of education, mental and physical health, etc.), both of them determining what will happen with the objective choice. And the human factor as the facilitator or enabler, which will guide the objective choice through subjective choice into effective choice — again determined by the context provided by legal and cultural framework.

So, MOOCs can be compared to the OLPC in the sense that they both provide good tools to “non-users” of education, but I would refrain myself to say that they both, by themselves, provide rough alternatives to the educational system. Not by themselves.