#Oped12 #MOOC Have people really understood what a great MOOC would look like?

What does a great MOOC look like from learners’ perspective? Through reading this post on MOOC,  it seems to me that the principal pedagogy of instructivism with a sage on the stage (with one SUPER PROFESSOR) teaching in a MOOC is emphasised in the x MOOCs.  Isn’t that the way most people are perceiving the x MOOCs (or the super MOOCs) too?

Ideally, Udacity and other MOOC providers will help strip away all the distractions of higher education — the brand, the price and the facilities — and remind all of us that education is about learning. In addition to putting downward pressure on student costs, it would be nice if MOOCs put upward pressure on teaching quality. Read more: http://nation.time.com/2012/10/18/college-is-dead-long-live-college/#ixzz29nAtt4gH

I think people might have got the whole ideas of MOOC too much relying on “teaching quality” alone. To me, MOOC is about LEARNING!  In an ideal learning ecology, learning (and teaching) should be focused on the learners’ needs, NOT just what the teachers want to teach. If MOOC is only about teaching, then the educators and designers need to be mindful about what is needed to support education and learning.  This is why Niazi has been struggling with the MOOC, when she couldn’t reach the media (Youtube) of instruction and assessment that she wanted. There are indeed so many roadblocks and distractions when learning online, that everyone has a story to tell.  But is it really what the learner wants?  How could we support our fellow educators and learners in MOOC?

Niazi loved MOOCs more than her own school, and she wished she could spend all day learning from Andy Brown. Read more: http://nation.time.com/2012/10/18/college-is-dead-long-live-college/#ixzz29nCE5Bh7

Isn’t it interesting to learn about students’ wishes, to learn from ONE professor only in a MOOC.  It is important to learn from professors and experts on specialized knowledge domain, in MOOCs, and I would fully think that is valuable from a learning perspective. My questions are, however: Is it good enough? Why?  Why not?  Especially in the case of online learning, and MOOCs.

The problem with the learning with an instructivist appraoch with ONE BEST TEACHER, might have assumed a knowledge transmission model in pedagogy.  This way of teaching would lead us to believe that if the teacher teaches “best” with the short video lectures, or the “flipped classroom”, then the learners would learn best. What are the assumptions made here?  Have we considered the motivation, the learning styles, the learning context and need for personalized learning here?  Perhaps, not much.  Or may be one could argue, these need not be considered in the case of “mass education” or, these are not THE HELPFUL questions to ask in MOOCs.

Without considering these basic assumptions, I don’t think we have addressed the core challenges in teaching and learning, when designing and delivering online courses such as MOOCs. What is more important is not the mere consumption of the content of the course (MOOC), but the application of theories and LEARNING (such as networked learning) into actual practice, in the learning process and journey. The assessment is just part of the learning, though it could play an important role when it comes to accreditation and certification of learning in formal education.

Learning is not just about certification alone, and so is not about getting a high grade, just to beat your other learners or to compete with others, and be the 1 or 3% genius on the top rank.   That is the traditional way of assessing and measuring students’ performance based on an elitist approach, in order to screen students – from the brightest to the worst students.

Does it help the students to perform better, just by testing alone?  No!  That’s why we need to provide plenty of options, opportunities of learning, and time for our students to keep practising, reflecting, and learning through different means – interaction with the professor(s), experts, other educators, peers, learners, industry specialists, and communities and networks WITHIN AND OUTSIDE the MOOC.

Learning in a MOOC takes its roots from conversation, interaction and new ways of thinking and practice takes place, in ourselves, with the network, and among the networks and community.  Learning would then relate to the achieving of personal goals, developing one’s learning strategies and literacies whilst constructing and navigating the networks.

Here in this post:

Creating a simple LMS is not simple, particularly when you are trying to align curriculum and instruction with modern constructivist pedagogy while simultaneously transforming a giant mob of participants into engaged community members.

Does it also mean that LMS is the way to go with MOOC? What does it mean when a constructivist pedagogy is adopted as the main approach to the  “teaching” of the massive students in MOOC? MOOCs would likely be best situated and appropriated when people apply what they have learnt not only from the professors, but with each others, through networking, interaction, conversation with a Connectivist and or Constructivist approach, where the learners could ultimately develop into fully autonomous, self-motivating and life-long learners. As commented in this post relating to Sebastian Thrun’s AI MOOC:

Mr. Thrun is talking like a true Silicon Valley entrepreneur. “The AI class was the first light. Online education will way exceed the best education today. And cheaper. If this works, we can rapidly accelerate the progress of society and the world.

Will online education way exceed the best education today?

Postscript: Watch this video presentation by Sebastian Thrun.  Rockstar professors – sound like a return to education by the SUPER PROFESSORS AS FIRST CLASS CITIZENS, NOT THE RESEARCHERS!

Sebastian admitted that a 25 years old graduate who taught in the Physics course in Udacity could do a better teaching than him, as a professor.   That sounds interesting.

But what is good teaching?  Is it just using multi-media to teach?  Or should it be more than just posting “great videos”?  How about facilitation skills of a teacher?  How about a visionary teacher who could mentor and guide learners towards learning (in learning metacognitive skills), and learning how to learn?

Should we focus more on adaptive learners and adaptive learning instead?  I still have reservation with the PUSH approach towards learning in online learning, where education is pushed to the students.

Is Khan Academy using an open PUSH or PULL approach towards learning?   Your view is important.

Here is a post about MOOC and Sebastian Thrun’s presentation.

Are we at the intersection of an education revolution?

Education revolution, these are buzz words that prompted me to think about what it means, and the implications on Higher Education, K-12, and even corporate education and training.

The recent blossoming of MOOCs have sparked new waves of educational reforms, and most spectacular, education revolution – online education is now up-and-coming with its full frontal launch.  This article on Come on revolution by Thomas Friedman has attracted 370 comments.

These top-quality learning platforms could enable budget-strained community colleges in America to “flip” their classrooms. That is, download the world’s best lecturers on any subject and let their own professors concentrate on working face-to-face with students.

All sounds good. What are the reactions of the commenters?

For any course that can’t be machine tested, and that would include any course that involved critical thinking and advanced problem solving, whether in the sciences or the humanities, who exactly will review the research, the solutions or the papers? Who is present to challenge students, to moderate discussions, to give them considered feedback, to make them think for themselves?

And where is all the informal education that takes place when students live together and share ideas and experiences based upon what they are learning?

These are all good questions and there are divided responses, as to what it means   when classes are flipped when teaching online.

The instructivist approach with intensive short lecture videos and posting of lecture notes, powerpoints, examinations, quizzes  in those MOOCs may be pretty effective in certain information transfer, and thus allowing students to acquire knowledge and skills in technical subjects, or subjects that have known and definite answers.  That’s why true and false, multiple choices or even short answer questions would be effective and useful in checking students’ understanding of concepts.  Such activities are often used in assessment in most traditional courses, from K-12, as they could also be easily marked, and viewed as “objective and valid” tools in assessment, if properly designed.  Does it challenge students to think and reflect on what they learnt?  To what extent are they effective in checking on students’ learning?  What happens if there are no one “right” answers to the questions?  How to ensure that students are not sharing their answers when responding to the questions online?  How to ensure that learning is applied in projects, problems, or at work?

How to teach in courses that involved critical thinking and advanced problem solving?  I don’t think the traditional teaching by “lecturing” over the students would provide the solution to the learning of critical thinking and advanced problem solving.  Why? First, critical thinking requires both educators and learners to re-think about the questions that need to ask, when wearing different but parallel thinking hats.  At times, with the additional hats, this may lead to further thinking which is transformational.

Whether such MOOCs could stimulate critical thinking would be dependent on how the course is designed, how the professors would moderate and provide feedback to learners, and how the learners would reflect on their learning.  I don’t think we have enough information at this stage, though there are a glimpse of insights from the comments:

First, this is not some sort of neocon plot to destroy higher education. In fact, several upcoming courses such as “Health Care Policy and the Affordable Care Act”, taught by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel or “Introduction to Sociology”, taught by Mitchell Duneier, promise to have ample room for progressive ideas and teaching.

Second, Coursera and similar efforts are not meant to replace the traditional classroom. I am currently enrolled in a course on programming language compilers which is being taught simultaneously to Stanford undergraduate students. The instructor is using the ‘flipped’ model, where classroom time is used to dive deeper into the material and explore areas that normally would not be covered. The free online students don’t participate in this, but we are still getting the entire core syllabus as taught at Stanford.

Finally, many people have insinuated that these courses are not rigorous. This is simply not true. In the compilers course that I am currently enrolled in, I have spent well over 100 hours working on the class project so far. (comments by Nic)

That’s interesting, as such learning seems to provide ample rooms for both the instructors and learners to flip the classroom.  Engaging learners in the learning process is critical to online education, and even more so if a flipped model is to be successful.  Flipping increases student interaction.  That surely helps students in learning in a classroom environment. Is flipped classroom the solution to education?

I think assessment is also an important part of active learning, not just the teaching.

In this what the students think on MITx:

Many of those taking 6.002x already have degrees, and are using the course to sharpen skills for personal or professional reasons. Brian Ho, the owner of a software-development company in Honolulu who has a long-running interest in robotics, has an electrical engineering degree and is using the course to “refresh” his knowledge of the subject.

“We are learning to think intuitively when approaching electrical engineering — an intuition I didn’t have before,” Ho explains. As far as the discussion forums go, he adds, “I equally enjoy helping other students … in the process of helping others, you are actually helping yourself because in order to explain a concept perfectly you really need to understand the subject.”

Are these typical in the responses from the Connectivist MOOCs?

There are strong views here on Faculty responses.

“But it’s not education, and it’s not even a reliable means for credentialing people,” Nelson said. Education calls for real interaction with faculty members and a consensus through which faculty members can design, manage and evaluate degree programs, he said. “It’s fine to put lectures online, but this plan only degrades degree programs if it plans to substitute for them.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/23/faculty-groups-consider-how-respond-moocs#ixzz1vjyZhcZ0
Inside Higher Ed

Is that education? May be, it depends on the purpose of education, and its content.

Is such online education or learning inferior?  I don’t think so.  See paper by Kop et. al. here that reveals learning experiences and pedagogy when learning in MOOC.

Are we at the intersection of an education revolution?

Do not expect an overnight revolution, as much time is needed for teachers and students to understand how to utilize e-learning capabilities fully.

Identify, target and support key likely benefits of e-learning, such as saving teachers’ time, supporting individual and group student working and opening new ways to reconfigure the geography and timing of class activities.

Netagogy would then be used as a holistic pedagogy, integrating and embracing the different, and overlapping pedagogy – a pedagogy relating to Information and Communication technology,  a pedagogy of abundance, digital pedagogy, and pedagogy in transnational education – transnational pedagogy.

#Change11 Gamification in Education

Is autonomy the name of the education game?

Here is a report on how gamification in education works.

Some experts call his approach an example of  “gamification”: use of game-like elements to increase student motivation or engagement.

“It is the use of game mechanics to make courses more engaging,” said Matt Kaplan, managing director at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. “Students will have to think, ‘How do I learn in this class, or where should I spend my effort?’ And they have to do it very carefully,” he said. Since the course is self-regulated, students have to take responsibility in building the coursework. And they have to have explicit goals early on and then take steps to achieve those goals.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/18/university-michigan-professor-explores-innovative-grading#ixzz1vGo3RhYp
Inside Higher Ed

I have created a number of posts on gamification in education here, here, here and here.

In a conversation with one of my best friends on MOOC, I wrote:

How many of the participants in MOOCs have ever thought about using Game Theory in facilitation, discourse and assessment (and grading)?  First, I am not sure if there are any education training programs having game theory as part of it. Second, the win – loss in games seem to be too dangerous in education, especially when it would become a behavioral approach towards learning, manipulating people in order to achieve the goals and outcomes.

Game Theory is used throughout business.  The recent edX, MITx, Udacity, Khan Academy, etc. all use Game Theory to a certain extent.  How? They all recruited lots of participants to join their “education revolution” and claimed glory because of that.  The Professors got their sponsorships, fame through promotion of their courses, their flipped classroom theory, their ground-breaking teaching etc.

So, why aren’t many others (in MOOCs) using such Game strategies to achieve similar Halls of Fames.  I am not saying that we should sacrifice education with commodification and monetization. What I think is, if one (or George, Stephen and others) wants to play the game of MOOC, then the application of Game Theory would help in understanding how we could achieve, using a hybrid of education/business model which is sustainable.

This similarly applies to Connectivism.  I think the principles behind Game Theory is also part of Connectivism, when applied in education and learning.

So, is Game Theory built on scientific grounds? Can Game Theory be used in online and distance education (as a business or personal learning)?

The closest to Game Theory that have been used in education is Learning Analytics, and in theory it is based on a scientific approach.  However, like Game Theory, there are still lots of ethical and privacy concerns.  Also, those sponsoring the project would try every means to influence the outcomes, so that only favorable ones would be published, and unfavorable ones would be dampened or never published.  That’s again a part of the Game – under Game Theory.

In summary, I reckon education and learning is a game, and now it’s a different game that we all need to adapt in order to play well.  Education Institutions could shape, respond, or adapt to the game as they play. This philosophy could equally be applicable to every educator and learner, as we are all part of the GAME, the Game of education and learning in this evolving and emergent world of education  and learning.

John