EduGeek Journal

1 | George Siemens

December 10th, 2010 at 3:33 pm

Hi Matt – the MOOC model seems to produce more dropouts than completers. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because learners have different goals, perhaps it’s the content, or perhaps it’s the facilitators. With each offering, we are getting a better understanding of the learner experience and ways that we can improve the offering. At this moment, lack of participation and drop outs are my highest priority areas for research.

The other aspect that has been over emphasized is the “Massive” part of MOOC. I think we should really focus more on the open/online. But I don’t quite understand you’re final paragraph – the courses I’ve been involved in are not at all like a 500 seat lecture hall. What part of the MOOC gave you that experience/impression?

George

2 | ruthdemitroff

December 10th, 2010 at 3:41 pm

I really like MOOCs. If 2,000 people around the world sign up and 200 people get involved in online discussions, right away 1,800 people probably wouldn’t be good choices for a personal learning network. At the end of the course, there will probably be 50 people who are really, really committed to learning from each other. Most of those become facebook/twitter friends and core contributors to one’s personal learning network. Courses come and go – it’s the connections that last.

3 | #PLENK2010 Short reflection on MOOC | Suifaijohnmak's Weblog

December 11th, 2010 at 4:06 am

[...] said in his confessions on MOOC:”To me, the advantage of taking a course is that you get to interact with the instructor or [...]

4 | Howard

December 11th, 2010 at 10:55 am

Hi Matt;
You touch on many different ideas. For one, I think there are different levels of pedagogical intent between say. . .:
1. A Psych 101 course when the intent is to pass on a rather standardized body of content and vocabulary.
2. An advanced seminar on learning where the intent is to form a nuanced ability to discuss contentious areas within a discipline and is structured by discussion in the literature,
3. A MOOC like the recent PLENK 2010 where the intent (at least for myself) was to explore an emerging area of practice.
The more messy things are, the closer it is to everyday practice where we’re often forced to “feel our way around” as we progress. The more open a course is, the closer it is to everyday practice, especially unstructured emerging practices.

5 | Eva Birger

December 11th, 2010 at 11:22 am

Hi Matt,

I enjoyed your confession. Like you I took the same course – but I finished.
I wanted to know, what is really going on in a MOOC. Neither do I wonder nor ponder, what I have gained in actual expertise or knowledge – I simply got, what I wanted to get, an assurance of my way of thinking.
The old guard, those who became my PLN, the professors, tutors, mentors and teachers are great people, since they know, how to provide contend. Just led them participate in a MOOC and they will perform the edugeeky way like you afterwards- and the youngsters are hard working and concerning educators, from whom I learnt a lot.
Anyhow, you did a little bit of advertising yourself. Keep on dethroning the LMS and – confessing.
Eva

6 | Anouk Janssens-Bevernage

December 12th, 2010 at 7:19 am

Hi Matt,
I can’t agree more with your reflections. I am a PLENK drop out – I gave up pretty early despite heaps of very good intentions and zero bias or reluctance to “unlearn” (Stephen Downes in his OLDaily response suggests this may be the reason why you – and all of us quitters?- dropped out). Any learning I do in my PLNs is also ill-structured and ‘in real life’ I’m very comfortable finding my own multiple learning journeys through these PLNs. However the “ill structured” learning we love is not the same as “messy”. MOOC is a great concept but it needs work. It’s too easy for the facilitators to say that we don’t “get” it. Thanks George for listening and investigating this further.
Anouk

7 | Matt Crosslin

December 12th, 2010 at 2:04 pm

Hi George – my comparison to the 500 seat lecture hall may be influenced by my experiences here in Texas. For those courses, you were usually thrown in to a big room and handed a syllabus. Much like Dave’s video explained, you had to figure out for yourself how to succeed in the course. The professor wouldn’t watch out for you, and getting an appointment with him or her could take months. I was always told that the key to success was to network with other students outside the course – to form study groups. You would get together with these groups, help each other with projects, discuss the course, and study together. Finding these groups often meant listening in class to find other students that responded well to instructor questions (“commenting”), and then rushing to get them in your group before 50 other students did. If you happen to pick a bad study group, well – too bad.

But, it is also obvious that I am putting up a worst-case scenario here – it is pretty easy to see that some people do learn from those types of courses.

I am with you on focusing on the open and online. I think that there are many ways to look at the concept of open. As long as it includes having the courses be free and accessible to everyone, I think you are going to have high problems with drop-outs. It is kind of like iPhone apps – if you talk to someone about the apps they have, they usually have 20 pages or so of apps If you ask them how can they possibly use all of those, they usually just say they don’t and they just had to download all of them because they were free. Offering a course for free is not a problem, but I think a lot of people are going to jump on it because it is free, leading to a large number of drop-outs.

But you don’t necessarily have to have your course be free and accessible to everyone for it to be open. The course I teach for UT Brownsville is only open to UTB students who have to pay for it, but the syllabus, content blogs, student work, etc all reside out on the web, in the open. Anyone can find it, but you have to be at UTB to get in as an actual student. Maybe some kind of application process for a limited number of spots would help with MOOCs – or maybe kill the concept. Who knows? But just having to fill out an application would probably make those that aren’t that serious move on.

I think also that there is a need for better tools to run a MOOC or even an open course or just a course in general. The New Vision for LMS ideas that we are exploring here could easily be adapted for MOOCs (http://www.edugeekjournal.com/2010/03/18/social-learning-environment-manifesto/). After all, there is nothing saying that courses in the New Vision idea have to be hidden behind a password.

I think part of the problem is also that we need a new structure for formal learning at colleges. If we had a tool like the New Vision LMS, one where Personal Teaching Environments were a reality, you could really begin to play with the whole structure of education. Instead of enrolling in a course, you would start following an instructor’s course feed, which is really just them researching and blogging and sharing with other students… maybe combined with a few basics that you also have to cover. Then, when you feel ready to complete the course, you complete the final project. The instructor could look at it and say “not quite, spend two more weeks in course and look at this and this” or even “great, you pass” or maybe even “I have never thought of that – you pass, and could you stay on a few more weeks to help flesh this out?” The student would move through the course at the pace they want to. The student population of the course would always be a good mix of newbies and students in the middle and students ready to finish.

From a structural standpoint, students would probably then be in charge of developing their own map of courses they want to go through, probably in the form a few “streams” that they study concurrently. Two streams would focus on one objective each for their topic, maybe another stream for their “electives”, and then a final stream for their “enrichment” course (what we call the basics now – languages, literature, history, etc). Students are always in a course from each stream, but they set the order of the courses and move through at their own pace. You could even theoretically have students with fewer streams (if they are part time).

From an institutional stand point, you probably have to move away from semester payments systems to more of a monthly payment system. I could also see this working great for face-to-face courses, too – where the discussion happens in a room with a revolving door of students. Instructors could also shift focus from getting a “class” done each semester to mentoring students in different places on the learning spectrum, while keeping current on their field and potentially getting tons of feedback and help on their own work in the process.

Okay, this is probably turning in to a rambling mess of free-thought. I’m not sure what exactly sparked it, but I think I need to organize my thoughts a bit and write another blog post.

8 | Matt Crosslin

December 12th, 2010 at 2:19 pm

@ruthdemitroff – I have two thoughts on what you have said. I think part of my problem is that the process to wait and whittle through the 2000 to the 200 to the 50 seems to be very time consuming process… and what if I choose the wrong 50 and my community dies out before the end? I wish there was a way to weed out the 1950 that didn’t need to be there from the beginning, because that is overwhelming. Not necessarily difficult, but we are all pretty busy.

I have made connections with people in traditional and other (non-massive) open courses. None of those connections survived. They made it through the class, but then got busy and their Twitter and blog accounts went dead. I’m not sure I can say it is the connections that last – to me, it is the knowledge and skills that I gain from other students that has lasted longer (for me at least).

@Howard – you’re right, there are different levels of pedagogical intent. And life is often messy. But I am often expected not to feel my way around at work, but to know exactly where to go and what to do. It is both, really – I find that life is a weird mix of messy and ordered, sometimes even in the same day.

@Eva – sometimes, for me personally at least, my way of thinking needs a good foundation shaking as much as it needs an assurance :)

@Anouk – I had to let Stephen know that if he really knew me, he would realize how silly his comments about me unlearning were. I like what Ilene the “Retired Librarian” said about it: “Hmmm… Maybe… but that just blames the learner and it’s just a way to shuffle off criticism. If students find your course confusing, perhaps there’s some ways to make less confusing. At the very least, acknowledge that the course IS confusing” (http://ilenef.blogspot.com/2010/12/mooc-flunkie.html)

9 | Joining a MOOC « Creating Understanding

January 9th, 2011 at 2:33 pm

[...] has been some discussion of MOOCs as a learning mode, both negative and positive and even one from George Siemens about his concerns. I am really excited about [...]