The end-of-course email was a good touch. Not all MOOCs I have looked at do this. The email is an efficient way of reminding students of the various resources that they have encountered, as well as alerting students other educational options (upselling). With Why We Post, this was a link to the MSc in Digital Anthropology.
I have just successfully completed two FutureLearn (full disclosure: a friend of mine works for the company, but beyond sharing some of my experience with him this has not affected my studies) courses: “Why We Post” and “Blended Learning Essentials: Getting Started.”
The “Why We Post” course was not what I thought it would be. Even though I knew what some of the focus was based upon listening to the interviews on the Click podcast, I still expected to see coverage of social networking platforms and techniques. The course was more the sharing of anthropological research from a series of field sites around the world.
However, it was a fun course and I particularly enjoyed the discussion board conversations with several participants. Each day I would eagerly check to see if there were any replies to a conversation in which we were exploring ways in which the research could be improved.
Book: How The World Changed Social Media
The course also shared some particularly helpful open resources:
The FutureLearn platform is very much designed for the Cloud. The central concept is that the courses, content, discussion, and student progress will stay there forever in an open and accessible format. I am a cynical individual, so my progress through the course was largely to copy content down to a working journal. Here I could record my progress and compose my responses before copying and pasting back to the discussion boards. For that reason, the course worked best for me where I could use a large monitor in a nice quiet office.
However, the platform would work very well for those on a mobile device (i.e. iPhone or iPad) with no need to save content locally. All elements of the course worked well on the mobile devices I tested on – far better than my experience with Blackboard or Desire2Learn.
Initially I was less impressed with the discussion board. The options to post and reply are very limited (no formatting of text or adding multimedia). Nested replies were not possible. However, I assume this is a tradeoff in terms of ease-of-use, security, and speed (storage). This did not prove to be an issue.
By testing on both courses I was able to experience quizzes, peer assessment, and video. FutureLearn provides both subtitles and transcription for the videos. The videos can be streamed or downloaded.
The profile options were simple, but easy to use.
The business model seems to be partially underwritten by “Statements of Participation.” These can be purchased after successfully completing a set percentage of the course. The certificates are reasonably priced, and can be embedded in LinkedIn. I was very happy to pay what I did for the experience. I have no idea how highly the statements are viewed by employers or higher education.
Blended Learning
The material here was more familiar to me, and I was interested to see how the two educators designed and delivered this course. One technique in particular impressed me…
Google Hangouts
Creating presence in an online course can be difficult – after a while students drop out due to inertia and competing demands on their time. With presence (the addictive need to check into a course and see what is happening), you are more likely to see those students complete the course.
Diana Laurillard and Neil Morris did a great job of crafting easily digestible content and activities that were just the right size. Additionally, they used Google Hangouts and Twitter to make themselves approachable and relevant as the course was taught. Answering questions live in front of a webcam is a scary experience, but became one of the high points of the course (one good technique that Neil followed was to blend live questions from Hangouts with printed questions and Tweets). I am very tempted to try the same thing later in the year.
Two quotes during the course resonated with me:
“It is hard to sell a thing that is free”
Neil Morris pointed out that the costs of developing the MOOC were high, and they had crafted a quality product. However, marketing a free service was far harder than getting students into a more expensive (but equivalent) experience.
“We must be careful that the educator’s ‘flexibility of time’ is not taken to mean ‘elasticity of time’”
Sound advice.
Anyway, looking forward to the second Blended Learning course in June.
I was in China recently, and towards the end of the trip a Chinese a teacher shared these example of Chinese MOOCs with me. I cannot speak for the quality of the courses, but here they are:
I am currently in Week One of the MOOC “Teaching Online: Reflections on Practice,” and already there is a wealth of material that I am putting to (good) use. My primary reason for taking the course was to get a deeper experience of Canvas (a Learning Management System), but the course aligns nicely with work and my interests.
One of the resources shared this week was an infographic for “A Simple Guide To 4 Complex Learning Theories” (Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, Connectivism). Very useful, and worthy of sharing:
I was lucky enough to visit edX last week. This is going to spur me into investigating their technology a little deeper. Johannes Heinlein provided a very helpful overview of where edX is now. Personally, I find it very interesting that Google is now onboard. edX might have the potential to supplant Moodle.
Anyway, Jeff Cattel (from CLN) sent us all a photo from the day…
Pearson has a published a very useful report on “Ten Years of Tracking Online Education in the United States.” The accompanying infographic is shared below. The complete report is available at:
Some colleagues at work were sharing this article in the New York Times (California Bill Seeks Campus Credit for Online Study). The article is worth a careful read – California is the place to watch, and this could be a turning point in the acceptance of some MOOCs.
The Coursera MOOC I was taking (Fundamentals of Online Education) was recently cancelled. The reasons behind this (and the way in which the course was cancelled) have been instructive. I believe that this particular moment will feature heavily in future analysis of the MOOC movement.
On the 2nd February, I received this short email message from the instructor:
We want all students to have the highest quality learning experience. For this reason, we are temporarily suspending the “Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application” course in order to make improvements. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause. We will inform you when the course will be reoffered.
Then I received this email update the next day:
Dear FOE students,
We were inspired to see the number of people who expressed an interest in seeing the class resume. There were some choices made in the initial design of the class that didn’t work out as well as we’d hoped. We are working to address these issues, and are reopening the discussion forums so that we can get feedback on how the class can be improved when it relaunches.
Thank you for your patience as we work to provide you with a great learning experience in the next version.
The FOE Course Staff
Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application Course Team
I don’t believe either of those emails were honest. The messages did not accept the three major problems that this particular course had:
The course was still under construction at time of launch.
The group model was both poorly designed and implemented.
There was no Quality Assurance in place before the course was offered.
The course was still under construction at time of launch
The first issue was inexcusable, particularly given the subject matter of the course. One of the fundamental tenets of good online course design is to have everything built before a course goes live. This does not preclude alterations and improvements (where justified) as a course is being taught, but this particular course still had “insert text here” content in the “About” pages. Going forward, Coursera needs to institute processes that ensure a course is ready before it launches.
The group model was both poorly designed and implemented
The second issue was interesting on several levels. The stated reason for assigning groups for students in the course was:
to make the discussions more manageable and to allow you to form networks with people in your own field and even with others not in your field. The idea was to create a world wide network of people who can help each other and to start building a world wide online learning community that will provide support and help.
However, MOOCs exhibit a significant attrition rate. In the first Coursera course I took these statistics were shared:
Number of students signed up: 45572
Number of students completing week 1: 1164
Number of students who took the Final: 5401
Number of certificates: 4595
To my mind, group membership would be significantly reduced by the end of the course (unless being part of the group successfully induced the majority of students to complete the course). I did not see this particular group model working. The instructor’s point about MOOC discussion being unmanageable is correct, and this is something that needs to be fixed, but the group method she implemented was not a viable solution.
Additionally, the methods in which students added themselves to groups were flawed. Initially this was through Google Docs, which does not scale to thousands of students (and resulted in records being deleted either inadvertently or to cause trouble). The later method was via discussion boards, in a way that was both inefficient and confusing. In neither option was there a way for students or Coursera to plan the composition of a group based upon any criteria (i.e. mixed skill-set, learning style, location, primary language, etc.). Hopefully the instructional designers and developers at Coursera will look for a method in which the course technology can automatically assign groups in an intelligent fashion. This would be an opportunity to run some very interesting and productive research.
There was no Quality Assurance in place before the course was offered.
Lastly, I did not see any indication of Quality Assurance being run in this course. If there had been a process in place that that reviewed the course before launch, then this would have caught that fact that the course was still under construction, and this should have also highlighted problems with the groups model. This is a major issue for Coursera to address. Oversight needs to be in place to demonstrate that a MOOC offers a superlative educational experience to students. The publishing industry relies on editors, proof-readers, legal review, designers, and peer assessment to ensure that what reaches the reader is a quality product. A MOOC should be have the same level of oversight as a good publishing house.
UPDATE: Interesting commentary from Slate on the “course meltdown.” Worth searching on Twitter for #foemooc
