Open Learning

DALMOOC 2.0 Re-Design

At some point, there probably will be a DALMOOC 2.0. I can say that with confidence because we are already having discussions about it. But the timing, format, etc are still a bit fluid right now. However, we (the DALMOOC team, not a royal “we”) have put a lot of time and thought into improvements and redesign. From my end as instructional designer, there are several issues I would like to address. This post really serves as a list for me personally, but might be of interest to others.

Instructivist Layer

  • The content later of DALMOOC had a good amount of focus on the facts of Learning Analytics (pedagogy) as well as a good focus on the how to learn about Learning Analytics (heutagogy). There is more discussion on ramping up the heutagogical side of the equation some more, which I think is great.
  • Where the design mostly fell flat on this layer was the assessments. They were tied to multiple competencies per week and left a bit open as to how to participants would complete them. We really need to focus on one assessment activity per week (or even every two weeks). This may mean reducing the number of competencies to one per week, or utilizing sub-competencies.
  • Additionally, since this is the more guided layer, the one assignment we create probably will need to have more guidance for how to complete it. That is the point of instructivism after all.

Connectivist Layer

  • This layer probably suffered the most from not have a good solid “glue” between the layers, so a lot of the re-design will be addressed in “The Glue” section next.
  • The assessment/artifact part of this layer also suffered from having so many competencies to complete, so focusing those into one artifact will help immensely.
  • The assignment bank was unevenly utilized, and that needs to be fixed. Having more focus on the competencies would help with this, also. The idea would be that the assignment bank gives various scenarios, artifact ideas, or data sources to use when working on artifacts to complete each competency. But what the bank contains could actually be different each week. One week that looks at, say, the history of data analytics could have a bank of ideas how to explain the history (video, paper, interactive timeline, blog posts, etc). The next week that looks at how to perform SNA could have a bank of sample data sets to use. Or a bank of scenarios of where to get data from. Finally, each bank would have a “do your own thing” option to point out to learners that in this layer they can come up with their own ideas.
  • Group connections and formation needs a lot of work, but the “Behind the Scenes” section will look at some of that.

The Glue

  • The original intention was to have a weekly/daily email that provided a connection point for all participants, as well as stepping out points and scaffolding for people that wanted to try out social learning for the first time. These emails never happened. And we found out that not everyone reads email (shocking, I know). So a new idea is being floated around.
  • This idea is to have a centralized website for the class. This website only displays what is being worked on that week (but with a menu to get to older content and the syllabus, of course). Basically, think a blog with a simplified theme that only shows one post at a time. This site intros the competency for the week, with options to choose which layer the participant is interested in. Selecting a layer would display links and instructions for what to do next for that layer (view videos in EdX, create goals in ProSolo, etc.). There would also be a link to a scaffolding area for people that want to try the connectivst layer but need guidance.
  • The information on this site would be blasted out to email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Whatever avenue people want to use to be informed that a new week of the course is posted.
  • Finally, this glue site would have a list of people that it recommends for you to connect with, as well as a list of Tweets and Blog Posts that interest you. Hopefully this could be personalized for each user – based on your activity, interests, skill levels, etc. More on that in the “behind the scenes.”

Behind the Scenes

  • The biggest changes to make all of this run smoothly need to be programmed behind the scene. For example, the glue site would need to support single sign-on between EdX, ProSolo, WordPress, Google, etc. Once you sign in, any link you click on should take you to something that you are already signed into.
  • Ultimately, it would be best to create the possibility for this sign-on could be handled by individual websites, so people can own their work and data for this course.
  • A more detailed Profile would be helpful. Using profile data along with course activity/posts/tweets/etc, various programs could recommend specific people for you to connect with, or even specific Tweets or blog posts you might like to read. These algorithms/programs/etc would be working behind the scenes to help find people and content for participants to connect with. At least, for those that choose to opt-in.
  • We are also pondering if we need to add better group tools into the glue site to help people with group activities. Or maybe add that to ProSolo. Plug-ins like BuddyPress for WordPress could create all kinds of tools for groups to use, at least for those that don’t want to find their own.
  • The teams working on QuickHelper and ProSolo also have some great ideas for improving their tools – but I won’t spill any beans on those because they can explain those ideas better than I can.

The Matrix

  • We had an initial course narrative based on The Matrix, but time prevented fuller development of that.
  • The red pill/blue pill metaphor seemed to help many understand course structure. We could possibly integrate that into the Glue website. For example, click on the red pill for one layer and the blue pill for the other. Maybe even create a purple pill metaphor for the scaffolding steps between the two.
  • Other things could be added – use quotes from the movie to explain things here and there. Add Matrix like graphics to the visual syllabus and videos. Have a distracting moving Matrix background. Someone could dress up as DALMorpheus and talk in riddles. And so on. I did make a mock-up of all of these ideas for a “Glue” website. As a warning, this takes the course narrative to Jim Groom extreme levels – which I love. But others don’t, so don’t expect DALMOOC 2.0 to look anything like this. But if we went full tilt on all of these ideas with the course narrative and glue website, it might look something like this.

edugeek-journal-avatarSo, any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, etc would be greatly appreciated.

(image credit: Flavio Takemoto, obtained from freeimages.com)

Metamodernist Instructional Design and the False Goal of Primacy in MOOCs

This has been an interesting year in the MOOC discussion realm, with everything from MOOC 4.0 to arguments about who controls the conversation about MOOC research. But a strain that has always seemed to existed in the discussion about MOOCs is the idea of making MOOCs more like a traditional college educational experiences. A recent entry into this stream by the title of “Why is the University Still Here?” caught my eye, and want to address some of the issues that are brought up in this article.

First of all is the idea that “those who wanted to be educated had the means to do so” because of libraries and expensive video lectures. I’m not sure there is much social research that would support that claim, since many people don’t have access to libraries, and even if they do, they run into a complex organizational system that becomes a barrier to entry. If people who wanted education could get it, we are all barking up the wrong tree to improve access in the first place. Why change anything if the people that wanted it can already get it?

Second is the idea that “education is simply not as native an activity for many adults today.” Those that research the blurred line between pedagogy, andragogy, and heutagogy would disagree. People are always learning in many informal and formal ways and always have been – maybe its just that the mainstream of education is finally catching up with this idea. At their most basic levels, the original MOOCs and connectivism tap into the idea that most adults are native to learning and are doing it all the time – its just the formal constructs of behaviorism and constructivism don’t seem to tap into this native learning (for many, many reasons that really have nothing to do with the constructs themselves but the ways many use them).

These two problems lead into the third and biggest issue I have with what the article identifies as the big problems with MOOCs: loss of primacy and motivation.

“Primacy is making education the primary activity of a student’s day, or perhaps more specifically, the primary thought activity of the day…. Primacy is deeply connected to motivation, since it makes learning the default rather than a conscious decision that we make throughout the day…. When we attend a physical university, we automatically give primacy to education…. There is also financial primacy that comes from paying large tuition bills…. New forms of online education like MOOCs lost both forms of primacy at once. By making them free, students had few incentives to not quit any time the course materials got boring or difficult. Without a physical presence, there weren’t the social peer effects of friends encouraging us to attend our classes on time, or shaming us about our poor performance.”

I’d love to know where these peers are that encourage and shame us to do better. I had professors that do that – but peers? They were usually skipping classes and study sessions with me :)

Basically, this is saying that traditional education works because educators have the big sticks of grades, passing, and keeping our money to force us to do good in classes, so our instructional designs are working because we can threaten learners with bad stuff if they don’t do what we tell them to when they get bored. And – bonus! – they will peer pressure each other to submit to this threat by putting them together in a campus.

To me, one of the greatest things we can learn from MOOCs is “what does it mean when we lose primacy and the threat of grades and failure?” What does your teaching or design look like when you can’t rely on bad things happening if learners don’t comply? How do you design for that?

But let’s look more at the ideas of primacy through the lens of how adults now natively learn.  The idea of primacy is a construct that came about through decades of modernist and then postmodernist thought that leads many people to think in black and white either/ors. Depending on who you listen to, postemodernism stopped being the dominant social paradigm sometime between 1975 and 2000, replaced by the idea of metamodernism. For those not familiar with metamodernism, the “meta” is not the same as we see in “meta-tag” or “meta-study”, but related to Plato’s “metaxy” (a swinging back and forth). It is the idea that our society no longer chooses either modernism or postmodernism, but combines both of them – often at the same time. Paradox and juxtaposition are one of the ten basic principles of metamodernism. Cultural theorists Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen describe metamodernism as

a continuous oscillation, a constant repositioning between positions and mindsets that are evocative of the modern and of the postmodern but are ultimately suggestive of another sensibility that is neither of them: one that negotiates between a yearning for universal truths on the one hand and an (a)political relativism on the other, between hope and doubt, sincerity and irony, knowingness and naivety, construction and deconstruction.

Many see this as the dominant mindset of our current society, whether we recognize it or not.

What does this mean for education? People no longer have a primacy in their life. Or, more accurately – they have several all at once. Education, jobs, family, hobbies, etc no longer compete for primacy, they all have primacy at the same time. Education is both native and non-native, because people are often learning formally and informally at the same time. People can want education and still not have access to it. Paradoxes are real and embraced.

(I can hear all of the pragmatists out there shouting “no duh!)

edugeek-journal-avatarWith the rise of the non-traditional student on physical campuses, this is also the case for traditional courses. This is the new educational world that we are designing for online and face-to-face. This is the future of quality university experiences. This is how humans are, how we have been for centuries really. We are finally getting to throw off the shackles of either/or black or white thinking (or maybe more accurately, more of us can join those who have been doing so for centuries). This is what MOOCs can teach us (and what they are actually doing a great job of teaching us). Instead of looking for how to re-create traditional education’s accomplishments online, we need to learn to embrace the paradoxes and juxtapositions that have always existed in successful education. This is the challenge for metamodernist instructional design: not instructivism or connectivism, but both. Not content or social interaction, but both (as #rhizo15 has put it: content is people!). Not andragogy or pedagogy, but heutagogy (which combines both informal and formal learning). We should embrace the paradox and reject the thinking that you have to choose between two options that actually both work.

(image credit: James Kunley, obtained from freeimages.com)

Call for Proposals for dLRN2015

A very interesting call for proposals (dlrn2015) looking at “Making Sense of Higher Education: Networks and Change”:

Learning introduces students to practices of sensemaking, wayfinding, and managing uncertainty. Higher education institutions confront the same experiences as they navigate changing contexts for the delivery of services. Digital technologies and networks have created a new sense of scale and opportunity within global higher education, while fostering new partnerships focused on digital innovation as a source of sustainability in volatile circumstances. At the same time, these opportunities have introduced risks in relation to the ethics of experimentation and exploitation, emphasizing disruption and novelty and failing to recognise universities’ long-standing investment in educational research and development.

The networking of higher education requires a research lens in order to make sense of its implications for learning and knowledge, particularly for learners who are not well served by the existing system. The Digital Learning Research Network (dLRN), funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explores how digital technologies are impacting all aspects of education, including research, teaching, learning, assessment, and support for underrepresented students.

The dLRN Conference – Making Sense of Higher Education 2015 – hosted at Stanford University on October 16-17, will offer a state of the field assessment from top international researchers and educators. This call for papers will be of interest to researchers, academics, and practitioners who are exploring the many nuances of the complex and uncertain landscape of higher education in a digital age.

What are the most pressing uncertainties, and the most promising applications of digital networks for learning and the academy? What agenda should be set for research in the near term? How best can researchers develop and share insights that will achieve practical outcomes and address systems-level challenges facing higher education, while establishing and applying robust standards of ethical practice?

We are keen to invite participants to evaluate current practices in digital and networked learning, whether formal, self-regulated, structured, unstructured, or lifelong. In particular, we are calling for papers that help make sense of what networks mean for the changing environment of contemporary higher education.”

See the full CFP for more details – abstracts due June 1st!

Which Came First: The Learning Design or the Tool?

Back in the day when I taught 8th grade Science, I worked at a school that most would label “inner city.” I had a room that was not designed for Science experiments, a small stash of equipment (most of which didn’t fit the state standards at the time), and $200 to cover all supplies and experiments for the whole year. Which doesn’t go very far considering the price of Science equipment, even back in 2000.

Oh, and I was fortunate that at some point they had replaced the standard school desks the other classrooms had with those huge black science desks that re-arrange more easily.

So I was forced to get creative (i.e. cheap) with my lab experiments. My favorite experiment was using a handful of dirt to explain the big bang theory. All you need is a white poster board and a handful of dirt and pebbles from outside. The handful of dirt represents the universe before the bang as you squeeze it your hand. Throwing that handful of dirt at the poster board represents the big bang. The resulting splatter on the poster board shows what happens after the bang. Simple, effective, and low cost.

Sometimes people think when I refer to “teaching the big bang with a handful of dirt” I am insulting something, but the truth is its really just a reference to doing the best you can with the tools you are forced to use. If I had had a better classroom set-up (with sinks), I could have let the students do the experiment. More money would have meant being able to buy kits that do the same thing, but that make a better “splat” (big bang) on a piece of paper. Even more resources and flexibility would have meant being able to show computer simulations on an overhead projector so that the students could have compared their splats to the model. And so on.

This post is inspired by a Twitter conversation with Whitney Kilgore, which I think eventually indicated we were talking about different angles on the idea of what drives design. Ultimately, I hope Whitney saw that I wasn’t disagreeing with her or debating, but saying that out of the two over-arching ways to approach design, I prefer one over the other while not thinking one is better than the other.

To explain what I mean, I’ll start off by looking at how we as instructional designers really have two over-arching approaches when we design courses: one where we are have to let the tools drive the learning design because of various limitations, and the other where the learning design drives the tool selection because we have many options. One is where we make do with what we have, and the other is where we get to do whatever the design dictates.

You can design really good courses either way. However, when you are limited in your tool selection due to budget or even campus policy that says you have to use a specific tool, you have to make concessions to get those tools to work for the design.  Most of us that are in education have been used to being either limited by budget or administrative decisions for so long that we don’t even realize the concessions we are making based on these limitations.

A lot of what I am talking about here was covered by Jim Groom in his “there’s more to education than the LMS” keynote at the OLC Emerging Technology conference last year. Its not that the LMS is evil – all technology has its possibilities and its limitations. Being forced to use a tool like an LMS means being forced to accept those limitations, even if your learning design will suffer immensely from those limitations.

Of course, there are also those courses that work well within the possibilities of an LMS, and others that use parts of the LMS in connection with outside tools very well. I teach a highly rated college course for the UT Brownsville Ed Tech department that just uses the LMS, a discussion board, a textbook, six pages of content (including syllabus) and four projects. This course was very well designed by the staff at the University (I am an adjunct for the course, so I can’t claim the design :) ), and almost always receives glowing responses from the students. This is because good course design is not about finding new emerging technology to make it “work,” but using good theory to design a solid learning experience. The course that I teach is also highly rated because it’s designers let the learning design drive the tool usage, instead of letting the tool drive the learning design.

For those that are curious, this course only uses the LMS to collect and grade the projects that students create, which are everything from videos they create to webpages they design. Other than that, the course is mainly in WordPress. Oh, and we also usually get really good responses on the discussion board.

This is probably where I go all metamodern on my five readers, but neither method is necessarily “better” by default. When I worked as an instructional designer, I designed award-wining classes that resided entirely within the LMS. There are also really, really bad classes that ditch the LMS and do a horrible job in the open web. Whether you let the tool drive the learning design or the learning design drive the tool selection – that is no indication of design quality. It just dictates what possibilities and limitations you deal with, and whether it is your choice to choose tools that match the possibilities and limitations you need for the design or if that choice is made for you regardless of what your design needs are.

Of course, as we found out at Jim Groom’s keynote last year – you start mentioning the limitations of the LMS and those that love the LMS will push back. As Jim pointed out, all tech tools are designed by people for a specific purpose. This means that they have a certain paradigm or theory coded into the design. Audrey Watters and many others have written and spoken on this also. These biases don’t mean that you shouldn’t use those tools, but we should all be aware of these very real limitations that exist.

One of the reasons I get frustrated with LMS companies is that they slap some social tools in their LMS and suddenly claim that they are social constructivist or connectivist or active learning or whatever the current buzzword is. Adding a social element to your course does not suddenly mean its social constructivist in nature. Instructivism just means that the instructor is the center of the course, and discussion boards, Twitter, VoiceThread, etc can all be designed in a way that still makes the instructor the center. But there are other claims that also don’t live up to the claims. Giving students the ability to click on more links does not make something interactive. Inserting YouTube videos does not create an active learning experience. I could go on and on, but I rarely see tools in the LMS that truly count as connectivist, constructivist, interactive, or active by themselves. Which wouldn’t be that much of a problem if the LMS companies weren’t claiming otherwise.

edugeek-journal-avatarSo the question is, which one is better: letting the learning design determine what tool possibilities and limitations you teach with, or letting the tool drive the design? In a real world scenario, you usually end up with a mixture of both. Even if you are forced to use an LMS by institutional decisions, there are many tools to choose from within that LMS. However, even when you are allowed to choose what ever tool you want, you may still not find the perfect tool. In that case, you would still have to let the tool drive the design in some ways once you have let the design considerations drive the tool choice. In the real world, these are not Yin/Yang opposites that never cross over into the other. You will use elements of both in most learning contexts. Metamodernism to the rescue!

(image credit: Gozde Otman, obtained from freeimages.com)

Ed Tech Skeuomorphs and Dual Layer MOOCs

Have you ever wondered where those tiny handles come from on some maple syrup bottles? The ones that are too little for most fingers that are strong enough to lift the bottle? This is a specific example of a skeuomorph – something that retains design elements from structures that were only necessary in the original design. Recently I read a random article about maple syrup bottles that reminded me of this word, and made me think how we have so many of these in ed tech.

Many LMSs are full of skeuomorphs. The LMS itself might be in danger of becoming a skeuomorph. We have tools online that host content much better. We have better tools for facilitating interaction. We certainly have tools that are more ADA compliant. We have better tools for creating social presence. We have better methods for protecting privacy online. And so on.

Of course, what might be a skeuomorph to one may not be a skeuomorph to another. Those that have some experience in a topic might find a linear instructivist path through course content to be a skeuomorphic design paradigm that hinders their ability to determine their own learning. A person that is new to the topic might find it a perfect fit.

Maybe I am stretching the analogy of skeuomorphs in Ed Tech a bit too far. But the reason I love the dual layer design that we have been working on with various LINK lab MOOCs is that it allows those that need certain design elements to still utilize them, while others that find them to be left over design structures from when they needed more instructivism (and now don’t) can skip them and dig into a more relevant learning designs.

The problem with our first stab at the dual-layer model was that the interface was too complex and difficult for many participants to find what they needed in the moment. So the next set of MOOCs to utilize a dual-layer design will focus on simplification of that user interface. What is needed is a system that will direct learners who need guidance and instruction to that instruction, while those that already know the content to some degree – who might find an instructivist path to be skeuomorphic – are led to the more connectivist, sense-making, chaotic side.

On one level – this is pretty easy. Find a clean, minimalist WordPress theme, remove a few elements that still might be distracting, and set it to only display the most recent post. That post will contain the basic outline of what needs to be accomplished that week, links to the the place where the two layers will occur, and links to previous posts for those that are behind. The other level that is more difficult is working behind the scenes to make sure that all of the tools that support the various layers integrate in a seamless way for a smooth end user experience. Well, not necessarily difficult as much as time consuming to map out logically and then program. Anyone that knows programming knows that is can happen as long as the tools that are used are willing to co-operate (and many are).

Looking at the graphic used in the previous dual-layer DALMOOC, this simplified interface would be in place of the “Main Weekly Email” at the top. There would also need to be some work to make sure that all of the tools in the rest of the diagram work seamlessly. This structure would probably also mean running a lot of the main registration and log-ins through this simplified interface (which may or may not be okay with some entities involved). Instructional design would also need some tweaking to make sure that the design also flows smoothly.

edugeek-journal-avatarThe basic idea is to simplify the end user experience as much as possible to let each participant decide how much complexity to add, what path to take, what is skeuomorphic to them in their context, and how to connect with others in the course.

(image credit: Sara Karges, obtained from freeimages.com)

Structuring the Initial Week of a MOOC (or An Online Course)

One of the topics that we get asked frequently about MOOCS is how to structure the initial / first / orientation week (including everything from the design of the syllabus to the “on-boarding” / scaffolding process to introductory content). And for good reason – that first series of interactions can seriously influence large numbers of learners to keep going or give up. Obviously, since you created the course, you want people to continue going and not give up. I can go through what we did with dalmooc and then offer some ideas that arose from that process.

Our general strategy was to have an orientation week (or “week 0”) before the first week of class officially started that was dedicated to on-boarding people with the course design and structure. This is generally when people would be looking at the syllabus anyways. But the reason that we didn’t make that Week 1 was that many people who take MOOCs are so self-directed that they are ready to jump in an figure it out as they go along (or advanced enough with MOOCs that there is nothing to figure out). We knew that we had to balance the needs of the new learners with the desires of experienced learners, without alienating either group or those in between. Having to sit through a bunch of orientation videos the first week would just chase off several advanced learners. They might intend to come back later, but that break in momentum would mean that many won’t. So the orientation was shifted to pre-course.

This orientation was basically a series of videos and Google Hangouts that covered course structure, introductions, a design, and assessments. I know that many courses do not cover the design process, but I am glad we did. In my opinion, part of creating an open course means that you also cover the design process. This way people can easily replicate your work at a later date. Here are the videos and Hangout archives for those that are curious:

 

 

 

 

The week 1 video was moved up to week 0 because we felt that it fit better in that spot, and the assessment video was created to answer some FAQs about that topic. These videos mainly served as ways to introduce the instructors and basic topics to the participants as well as to expand on the visual syllabus.

I have discussed the visual syllabus in this blog in several places. Some of the relevant posts to this topic are listed here:

Other posts in that series might also be of interest for other reasons depending on where you are in the design process. George Siemens’ reflection on the first week of DALMOOC also covers many issues that affected our design decisions and highly recommend reading his reflections.

A couple of quick notes about the technical side of creating the visual syllabus (which you can skip if you are not interested). It was built utilizing a self-hosted WordPress installation using the incredible services of Reclaim Hosting. We used the Pictorico theme, but I customized / hacked the front page that you see. I basically copied the source code from the original theme home page to a new file (index.html), cut out the distracting elements, and added the parts you see. Those are technically square images on the front page, but I used Fireworks to add a circle overlay to make them easier to distinguish. I also added the numbers in Fireworks, and found the background/header images on freeimages.com. The diagrams throughout the syllabus were also built in Fireworks (PhotoShop, GIMP, or other graphics programs would also work – probably even better) and sliced into squares to add the pop-up links. Those pop-ups are a WordPress plug-in called Fancybox that works well..

So, enough of the technical side. The actual instructional design of the syllabus is the important factor. George Siemens really wanted the visual syllabus aspect for dalmooc. He wanted to avoid the wall of text. I also went for scaffolding the syllabus in a way that should be easy for completely new learners to tell where to start, but had enough there to guide more experienced MOOC participants to the parts they wanted. Too much text on the first page would still mean “wall of text.” So the roll-over effect for those first page images (they came as part of the theme we picked) were perfect – you get the info when you need it, but its not there to stress you out when you don’t need it.

The visual diagram might seem to be a necessity for a complex course design like the dual-layer design, but in reality I would say that every course really needs one. Don’t assume that your learners can visualize your course flow just because it seems simple to you. What you see as simple might be due to a cultural norm that doesn’t translate to other cultures (not only your social/geographical culture but also your institution’s institutional culture).

I’m also a fan or roll overs and pop-ups that expand the content (as you can tell). That really helps with not only the new learners that need scaffolding, but also with non-linear thinkers that want to remix your intended order on the spot. With Federated Wikis gaining momentum, I think this ability to reorganize content as the learner sees fit will be a big deal. While pop-ups aren’t truly “remixable” content, they do allow a pick-and-choose method that comes close.

The general idea for the design of the syllabus was to scaffold participants into the overall structure of the course: start with “basic” and go deeper and deeper into various levels. Additionally, I took a cue from Jim Groom and DS106 and utilized a visual metaphor for the course. DS106 uses these metaphors (ds106zone, thewire106, etc) to add personality and presence to courses. Yes, even a course itself can have presence. Time constraints kept us from carrying this metaphor through the rest of the course, but I would suggest any course take this idea and fully implement it.

So to wrap up with some final thoughts on design and the first week of a MOOC (which could also apply to any course, really):

  • Never assume that something makes sense to everyone just because they signed up for your course. Keep the complete newbies in mind as much as the self-directed learners. Too many college courses are designed more on the self-directed learner end. Which means you probably end up explaining a lot of the same basic stuff over and over and over again, right? Think about it.
  • At the same time, don’t force the self-directed learners to go through everything that the newbies need to. Consider non-linear learning paths, dual-layer approaches, connectivism, etc. If you don’t have access to something like Ning or ProSolo to accomplish the connectivist layer, you can always use something like the BuddyPress plug-in for WordPress or a self-hosted installation of Known to accomplish the same structure.
  • While visual and video elements are important for breaking up content, don’t forget that not everyone has perfect sight. Keep accessibility mandatory.

edugeek-journal-avatarI think I am leaving out a few ideas that I had on this issue, but this post is already long enough. If you have any questions on specific design decisions or technical details, I would be glad to answer them. With access to a good instructional designer, knowledge of basic html, and basic experiences with a graphics program you should be able to accomplish much of what we did in your MOOC orientation/syllabus.

(image credit: Flavio Takemoto, obtained from freeimages.com)

Why Your Institution Needs Open Online Courses

I will be the first to admit that there are some good reasons to hate MOOCs. The problem that I run into, however, is that when I talk to people that don’t like MOOCs, none of those good reasons are on their list. You usually hear default arguments about drop-out rates, lack of feedback, cost, etc. Not that those aren’t valid issues, its just that the way most people look at those issues are flawed. Most of those flaws have been effectively addressed in research papers and blog posts.

What I would generally say in response to the people that don’t like MOOCs is 1) forget the term MOOC and 2) just focus on the idea of open online courses and why you need them. No matter what your institution is, if you are in education, I would say you need to be doing at least some experimenting with open online courses… and I mean fully open courses, not just ones that are an extension of a college course (i.e. some of your learners are earning credit).

The “killer value” (in my opinion) from a design standpoint with open online courses is that all of the learning is voluntary. No one is holding a carrot of “grades” or “passing for credit” in front of the learners. By investigating what happens in your own open online course, you can see first hand what works and what doesn’t when learners have to be purely intrinsically motivated. This research into practical application can then directly influence the design of your traditional classes. What do the successful parts of open online courses tell you about learners in your institution’s courses? What does learning look like when threats of institutional punishment are removed from the equation? If something doesn’t work in an open online course, should you really consider that a “good” learning design in a traditional course? Sure, you can force them to do whatever you want with the threat of failure – but how effective is that for authentic learning?

Faculty – think about this: what does it tell you about your abilities as an instructor when you are teaching an open course and can no longer rely on graded discussion boards to connect with learners? What does it tell you about your ability to foster community when you can’t force learners to reply to at least two other threads? Think of all that you can learn about yourself and teaching in general from teaching in an open online course.

Sure, you can read the research about these issues and glean some insights from the literature. But those papers are not written in your unique context. Some factors are going to be different in some major way. You really need to know these issues within the context of your institution, your faculty, your class, your instructional designers, your students (and potential students), etc.

edugeek-journal-avatarI would even go so far as to say that every instructor that teaches online should be required to teach at least one open online course every other year or so – maybe even more often. It really is an eye-opening experience.

(Quick note: I realize that there are many, many other killer values out there for open online courses – I am just highlighting one that has been on my mind for a while.)

(image credit: Sanja Gjenero, obtained from freeimages.com)

Rant Up, Rant Down, or Learn To Rant Better?

Interesting post recently from Jesse Stommel that basically takes The Chronicle to task for allowing people to mock students in an open, official section of their website. I have never really been to the “Dear Student” column, and I am glad that I haven’t. Student shaming really isn’t any better than any other form of cyber bullying.

However, I do have another concern about the post, or I guess I should say with some of the responses to the post. When Stommel says “rant up, not down”, he clarifies it later in a comment that probably gets buried in the long list: “I agree that we need to have open discussion about real concerns, but there are better ways to have those conversations than stereotyping, mocking, and belittling.” The point is not to tell instructors to just stop discussing their concerns, but to learn how to discuss them in a productive way without ranting. And if you have to rant, do what most professionals do and keep it private.

A lot of the response that I have seen to the blog post really focus on that “rant up, not down” part. This is where I would be careful – I was at a University in the 90s that had a leadership change that took this approach. While I generally liked the new president that came in, he did go too far into shutting down faculty concerns…. and the students knew it. The campus went from having a fairly challenging learning experience to one that barely pushed us at all.

Education needs to be challenging sometimes. We need to struggle and be pushed at times. When students know they can complain in the right way and get the faculty in trouble, it creates a weird power dynamic. I remember other students plotting how to get their instructors in trouble when they decided an assignment was too hard. For people like me that really wanted to learn, being stuck in a group assignment with these bums was horrible.

The things is, I know that when you put all of the power in the instructor”s court, you usually create a high stakes system where learners become afraid of failing. Failure usually has dire consequences in power imbalanced systems, so cheating is usually rampant and students rarely take chances. They just want to know what exactly they have to do to pass. Sound familiar?

But if you swing the other way, and imbalance the power towards the students, this creates a system that makes the instructors afraid to push and challenge learners. Learning becomes stale and watered down, taught in way that makes everyone happy with their grades. That probably sounds familiar, too.

The reason these two sides sound familiar is because our educational systems often swing like a pendulum between the two. There is always a power imbalance in some direction, causing major issues.

edugeek-journal-avatarThe goal for education should be a fairly balanced share of power for all involved. This balance of power would actually be empowering for all involved. So, please make sure that in reading articles like Stommels (and I agree with his demands that The Chronicle pull the column and apologize) that you don’t advocate for a swing in power that will cause imbalances in education.

(image credit: Gozde Otman, obtained from freeimages.com)

The Mirage of Measurable Success

The last post that I wrote on measuring success in MOOCs created some good, interesting conversation around the idea of measurable success. The most important questions that were asked had to deal with “why even offer dalmooc if you don’t know what measurable success would look like?”

That’s a good question and one that I think can be answered in many ways. Honestly, the best answer to that question is “because four world-renowned experts wanted to teach it and a lot of people signed up to take it.” To me, especially in the informal realm of education where dalmooc existed, that is one of the biggest measurable signs of success. We live in a world that is so full of compulsory education and set degree plans that we forget that choosing to sign up for an informal voluntary learning experience is measurable success in itself. Over 19,000 people initially said “that sounds interesting, sign me up,” with over 10,000 signing in at one point or another to view the materials. Hundreds of participants were active on Twitter, Facebook, EdX forums, ProSolo, Google Hangouts, and other parts of the course. All voluntarily.  To me, that is measurable success.

Another area of measurable success, although definitely more on the qualitative side, is what I covered in the last post:

So maybe when the participants use words like “blended” or “straddled” or “combined,” those statements in themselves are actually signs of success. In the beginning, some claimed that DALMOOC was more cMOOC than xMOOC, but by the end others were claiming it was more xMOOC than cMOOC. Maybe all of these various, different views of the course are proof that the original design intention of truly self-determined learning was realized

To clarify this a bit more, there are those that thought that dalmooc was more instructivist / xMOOC:

https://twitter.com/cpjobling/status/555074861320921088

And then there were those that thought it was much more connectivist / cMOOC (myself included)

So to me, that is another realm of measurable success – learners came out of the experience with vastly different views on what happened. That was a goal we had.

However, I know that when people talk about “measurable success,” they are usually referring more to standardized test results, student satisfaction, completion rates, and – the holy grail of education – grades! The elephant in the room that many people won’t deal with, but we all know is true, is that these measures of success are often a mirage.

Standardized tests are probably the biggest mirage of all. The problem is that a score of 90% on a test really only means that a learner was able to mark 90% of the questions correctly, but not necessarily that they actually understood 90% of the material. They may have only understood 60% of it and guessed the next 30% correctly. The fact that the right answer is somewhere in a list of multiple choice answers should negate their usefulness as a way to measure success, but our society still chooses to ignore this problem. Then you can add into this mix that most multiple choice questions are poorly written in ways that give away the answers to people that are taught how to game them (like I was).

Then there is the problem of coming up with questions for tests. Some tests contain, say, two questions about the core knowledge that learners should have gained and then a whole lot of related trivia that they could just Google if needed. Yet they could still get the two essential questions wrong and all the rest correct and will be labeled as “mastering” the concept. Rubrics for papers or projects often do the same thing – giving most points to grammar and following instructions and few to actual content mastery. Someone could write a great paper that shows no knowledge of the topic at hand but still pass because they got all other areas perfect.

Add to this that we would compare two children to each other based on this false sense of “success.” One child could have tanked a test based on the trivia but got all of the core content correct and still be labeled as less successful than the one that got the trivia right and core knowledge wrong…. just because its all on the same test. Oh, and let’s not forget the practice of giving similar or equal weights to all questions on a test when not all questions are really equal. Again, two learners could get the same score, but one only answered the easy questions correctly while the other answered all of the challenging ones correctly.

And speaking of different learners, there is always the oft-ignored problems of cultural bias in testing and learning.  Are learners not testing well because they didn’t learn, or were there cultural references on the test they didn’t get? Did a learner really learn the content, or were they just able to quickly memorize some factoids because of some weird thing Aunt Ida said about planets that helped them connect the new information to this weird family quirk? Are they being labeled as smarter because they are or because their weird Aunt Ida gave them a memory that helped them memorize?

Most of what we call “measurable success” in education is really just a mirage of numbers games. For those like me that fell on the privileged side of those games, it was a great system that we probably want to fight to keep. And we are probably most likely the ones now in control, so….

Now, of course, this is not to say that learning isn’t happening. This is more about how most institutions measure learning and success. I believe people are always learning formally and informally, even if its not always what they had intended to learn. It just takes a lot of time, effort, and money (yes – money!) to truly assess learning, and the educational field in general is being tasked with the opposite. “Do better assessment with less money, less time, and less effort (ie people power)!” No real easy answers, but there is a problem with the system and the culture that drives that system that needs to be addressed before “measurable success” becomes a trustworthy idea.

Measuring Success in MOOCs (or More Specifically, DALMOOC)

I was asked last week how we knew whether or not DALMOOC was successful. Seems a fair question since “success” in MOOCs seems to be measured by everything from completion rates to enrollment numbers to certificate numbers to alignment of the stars on the Wednesday of the first week the MOOC is offered. I had to be honest about that question and say that since everyone that work on DALMOOC lived and are still on speaking terms (at least as far as I know), then we were successful. Running a MOOC can be far more intensive and stressful than many people realize. We almost didn’t make it out the other side with everyone still happy.

In some ways, when I see people saying that we were blending xMOOCs and cMOOCs, or combining the two, I think we might have failed in the communication of what we were doing. Maybe I can blame that somewhat on our current educational system that only thinks in linear ways; therefore any course with more than one layer is not scene as complex, but “blended” or “combined.” Words like “straddled” seem closer, but to be honest we didn’t feel the need to straddle. We just had two layers that were not walled in, allowing learners to choose one or the other or both or to move back and forth as they felt. Infinite possibilities. A Multiverse Open Online Course maybe even. But not really a linear mix of the two from the design side.

Of course, the learner experience was linear even if they skipping back and forth between both layers. So maybe when the participants use words like “blended” or “straddled” or “combined,” those statements in themselves are actually signs of success. In the beginning, some claimed that DALMOOC was more cMOOC than xMOOC, but by the end others were claiming it was more xMOOC than cMOOC. Maybe all of these various, different views of the course are proof that the original design intention of truly self-determined learning was realized. At the very least, DALMOOC feedback was an interesting study in how bias and ontologies and epistemologies and all those -ologies affect participant perception of design. Maybe it doesn’t matter than participants can’t articulate the basics of dual layer architecture because the point all along should have been to hide the architecture and let learners learn how to learn.

So, at the end of the day, I will be able to come up with some philosophical jargon to “prove” that DALMOOC was a success to the powers-that-be who ask – all of which will be true. But to be honest, the only thing I really want to do is shrug my shoulders and say “beats me – go look the participant output itself and see if that looks like success to you.”

Looks like success to me.