Openness and Innovation in MOOCs

Here is my response to an insightful post on Innovation Confusion, where Cole says:

some of the best conversations I’ve ever had in this field have centered around the ideals of openness, but now that the MOOC thing has happened the same people who built rallying calls for more open access to learning are now rejecting this movement. Why? Because it is driven by corporations trying to make money? Because it isn’t really open? Because the press isn’t giving a few people the credit they believe they deserve? Because these aren’t really courses?

I can’t speak for others on pro or anti-MOOC, but for me, I have been both excited and interested in this MOOC movement since its inception in 2008. If we are being honest with integrity, in truly embracing a spirit that: Higher Education is a basic human right, and what we are aspiring to is democratising education, then I think few would oppose to this “Education Revolution or Transformation”.

Would people be more reserved or careful in stating their visions, and missions, in terms of profits or non-profits, and whether they are going to offer course (like MOOCs) truly open and free? Openness and free has been one of the hall-marks of MOOCs, at least in attracting people to join. Would that concept of openness and free change upon time?

At the start, many MOOC providers said they would not endorse or offer credits transfer or recognition. May be this is all changing, when the environment has changed. These are all good news, from certain perspective, as more learners could get a great education from the “best professors” and “elite institutions” of the world. Why not going for it? I see all these as positive movement, though it is also a disruptive innovation, from my point of view.

Most institutions have understood that the best way to combat a disruption (MOOC) is to set aside a separate institution (i.e. a MOOC provider) which is separated from their own institutions. If such MOOC succeeds, that they could safely transition into the disruptive model with MOOCs, and could then survive and thrive. On the other hand, if they don’t do anything on that, or not responding with appropriate strategy, then they could be overtaken by the MOOCs and other institutions. Embrace MOOC or face decline.  Not many people are highlighting the use of such strategies and strategic positioning, as many are educators, not education strategists.

I don’t claim I could predict this all, but the principles of safe-to-fail is evident in this MOOCs strategic adoption. Institutions cannot and would not afford to fail at this critical moment, with the strategic use of MOOCs. This together with the call cards of the superb professors and (Khan Academy) etc. would surely change the game all over, leading every one to focus on the development of MOOCs as strategic opportunities, with positive energy and direction, as also hailed by Cole.

How do I see MOOC? I see MOOC as a pedagogy, a tool, a platform and technology affordance which evolves from one generation to another, with certain ideology changes throughout the past years. I think education business has its economic and educational roots and both profits and non-profits have always evolved and emerged when education becomes a critical mass. I have shared in another comment that “we have to live with it, if that is the way education is structured. Have we tried to adapt, shape and change in a way that truly transforms education, as a community, with our transformative learning in action, especially with the early cMOOCs? It has ignited the passion of learning, for many, I think. Who want to see education left broken? May be there is a highway, though it is much more difficult for people to chart it out, as the money comes into the way. From a historical perspective, education has always been inter-mingled with business for profits, technology and culture. I do hope there are more visionaries who would take up the “lead” in truly transforming education, and not being lost in the craving of profits with greed. Learners and learning must come first, in building a better and stronger nation, and world.”

We hope we could continue to chart out all the positives from the MOOCs, though we should also be cognizant of what these mean for our and next generations. This is not just about getting a neo-liberalism sort of education, or privatization to improve education, but a whole new philosophy of education that sets off a new landscape and landmark in the historic moment of education. Don’t we want to leave a great legacy? A renewed world of education that advances human towards a better future, rather than building just empires or walls between education, and chains, as a result of competition. What do you think?

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From Best Practice to Creative, Innovative, Emergent and Novel Practice with MOOCs

I have often come across instructional designers and institutions grappling with best practice, in instructional and curriculum design.

A research on instructional design indicates the various “best practices” ranging from teacher-centered approach with LMS, to learner-centered approach with PLE/PLN.

Here in a paper on MOOC-Design-Principles.-A-Pedagogical-Approach-from-the-Learner by Lourdes Guàrdia, Marcelo Maina, Albert Sangrà:

focus on empowering learners in networked environments for fostering critical thinking and collaboration, developing competence based outcomes, encouraging peer assistance and assessment through social appraisal, providing strategies and tools for self-regulation, and finally using a variety of media and ICTs to create and publish learning resources and outputs.

These MOOC Design Principles are well argued and grounded.  In reflection, there are many useful strategies that are applicable both for the c and x MOOCS.  I would argue that these are based on emergent practice rather than best practice experience.

What sounds like best practice often doesn’t deliver to its promise, despite huge efforts in promoting and educating various designers, instructors and assessors.  Why?  The reasons lie mainly with the assumptions behind what makes best practice, especially in MOOCs.

In my previous post relating the differences between x and c MOOCs in attracting number of participants, I discuss on:

4. Degrees of difficulties – xMOOCs are much easier compared to cMOOCs.  This is grounded on that in xMOOCs, the instructors would have done most, if not all of the ground work necessary for teaching and learning for the learners.  What the learners are normally expected to do would be to consume the knowledge transmitted or broadcasted to them, and to confirm their understanding of the concepts through repeated quizzes or assignments.  This requires certain perseverance from the learners, though it is possible to achieve a high or perfect score in test, assignments and examinations through drills, repeated practice, as is common in a rote learning scenario.   The use of standard answers in the case of multiple choices, true/false, or short case scenarios, could all be checked with automated grading or assessment software.  For peer assessment, these are done in a closed manner, with the merits of “protecting” the learners from being “criticised” in public, but the demerits of being critiqued by only a few participants (4-5 other peers) in the whole evaluation.  Nevertheless, this seems to be well accepted as a way to assessment in the xMOOCs, as that might be the only feasible and reliable way to assess students in an institutional environment, without overly involving the professors in the assessment.

On the other hand, cMOOCs are much more difficult in terms of the wide array of skills and capabilities – such as a thorough understanding of the various artifacts posted, an evaluation of the artifacts, an aggregation of information, and the re-mixing, re-purposing or re-creating of posts that are based on knowledge creation and re-creation.  These artifacts or posts are also publicly available for assessment by peers and other educators, leading to further critique and discourse.  The main assessment has still been based on the feedback of the instructors, in the case of for-credit participants, though the assessment for non-credit participants are based on an optional basis, without any particular feedback report from the instructors (as this is not possible for the instructors to deal with massive number of participants).

5. Perceptions of learners – xMOOCs are based on 1,2,3 above, and 4 – learners – cMOOCs would have to curate resources and create blog posts/join forums.  The centralised platform (LMS) typically employed in the xMOOCs may be much simpler than the blogs and Personal Learning Environment/Network (PLE/N) as used in cMOOCs.

6. Pedagogy – xMOOCs employ a familiar pedagogy – mastery learning based on an instructivist approach (behavioral/cognitivist strategy) and peer assessment, whilst cMOOCs employ a relatively demanding pedagogy – social constructivist/connectivist approach which could sound chaotic at first sight.

xMOOCs rely principally on video lectures, resources posted on the LMS/main course website,  followed by questions, quizzes, some forum discussions, assignments, tests and examination.

cMOOCs rely principally on the connectivist principles as proposed by George and Stephen, with networked learning and connectivist knowledge based on aggregating, re-mixing, re-purposing and feed-forwarding of information.  As I have suggested here.

I still think the notion of best practice would be applicable only to simple scenarios of the Cynefin Model as developed by Dave Snowden.  You could have good practice under complicated learning scenario.  In the case of complex learning scenario such as MOOCs (especially in cMOOCs), then it is important to realise the emergent practice which is relevant, rather than good or best practice.  In the case of chaotic learning scenario such as cMOOCs,  novel practice is required in the curriculum and instructional design.

In summary, design of curriculum and instruction for MOOCs could be based on sound design principles as the research into MOOC reveals.  It would be imperative to move from best practice to creative, innovative, emergent and novel practice in the case of MOOCs, based on the needs of the learners, and the learning context, rather than the traditional “best practice”.  One size doesn’t fit all, especially in learning in MOOCs and so it would be necessary to consider emergent design learning principles rather than the “static” instrumental didactic instructivist approach in MOOCs (such as xMOOCs).

Pictures: From Google image

How to explain the current xMOOCs in terms of education model and pedagogy?

Daniel in his post of  a criticism of computer science models or modeles says:

The problem is made worse by the fact that researchers working on modèles more easily get the upper hand. They are never wrong. They can endlessly refine their modèles and re-evaluate them. As long as there is no actual problem to be solved, the modèles will tend to displace the models. Cargo cult science wins.

Of course, the reverse phenomenon may exist within industry. People working with modèles are at a disadvantage. They can’t make useful predictions. They can only explain, in retrospect, what is observed. All their sophistication fails to help them when real-world results are what matters.

I agreed with Daniel’s views.  How would this scientific model be applicable to Higher Education?  Or can we really explain the MOOCs phenomena using the scientific modelling?

May I share some ideas below, which I think is relevant to the building of models in education?

What I noted in recent years is that ideas and concepts seem to be more convincing than the empirical data and experimental proof, especially in “social science”. Why?

As Clayton Christensen mentions here, most academics are looking for data for analysis before they would make recommendations for further action in the introduction of innovation.  The first cMOOCs were run based exactly on Theory (Connectivism as a new and emerging learning theory, as proposed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes).  The xMOOCs were again run based on the Theory of Instructivism where Mastery Learning and Video based learning (coupled with flipped classroom) would work.

The current MOOCs proved that is the case, based on the assumptions that Mastery Learning and Instructivism are what drive learning to be achieved, though “peer learning” was added when researchers later found it had happened.  The video lectures were again “augmented” with the flipped classroom model, in order to explain why xMOOCs are so successful as a special pedagogy, where the whole phenomena was explained with a post-mortem basis.

There have been some researches done in explaining the cMOOCs movement from the basis of Complexity Theory and Chaos Theory, Self-organizing Theory and Theory of Emergence.  Not many people seem to have applied that in the case of xMOOCs.

Indeed, when we examine the xMOOCs pattern of education and learning, the whole notion of learning could be explained when individual learners interacted with the content and made use of the LMS as a platform for some of the information sources.  The participation and completion did fall under a similar pattern to the cMOOCs though xMOOCs are normally far “richer” in terms of the information provision and “instruction” via the video lectures.  Indeed the quizzes and examination are merely “transferred” from the typical face-to-face courses, only that they are all based on auto-grading, and thus address some of the challenges that once weren’t fully covered in cMOOCs.

So, my conclusion is that people often tried to explain a phenomena by pre-conceived and well-designed instructions and wonderful pedagogy in order to fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy, which may unfortunately not always be representing the actual pattern of education and learning that has taken place.  The current xMOOCs can likely be explained much better through the interaction learning theory, with Complexity Theory of Education and Theory of Emergence, and Connectivism as a model of education.  There are obvious conflicts to the mission of education under an institution framework, as the low completion rate of MOOCs don’t align with original goals set off in Higher Education.   There are many major conflicts with institution mission as mentioned by Clayton Christensen in the discussion of MOOCs.

Here is how a cMOOC work, and that could explain partially why xMOOC work too.