A Chronicle Conversation as MOOC

This showed up in my Chronicle list: ‘Open Teaching’: When the World Is Welcome in the Online Classroom. It’s a brief overview article of open classes (with a focus on being taught rather than learning), covering Downes, Siemens, and Wendy Drexler at U Florida. A good article as an overview, touching on the use of PLEs -

Instead of restricting posts to a closed discussion forum in a system like Blackboard, the class left students free to debate anywhere. Some used Moodle, an open-source course-management system. Others preferred blogs, Twitter, or Ning. In the virtual world Second Life, students built two Spanish-language sites. Some even got together face-to-face to discuss the material.

- and ending with the typical “educators are cautious.” There’s one misunderstanding that stands out for me, here, with the idea that BBoard or any LMS would be opened up to created a MOOC:

At the end of the day, the popularity of open classes will depend on whether learning-management software companies like Blackboard make it easy to publish open versions of online courses, says David Wiley, an associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young and an open-teaching pioneer.

This seems to go against the grain: It’s not a matter of letting students into the garden. It’s a matter of creating allotments.

But more interesting than the article are the comments, from Drexler and others. I’ll start with Drexler, who adds to the article’s content with some reassuring pre-conditions:

There are certain foundational skills necessary for learning in an open online environment. Early research indicates the need for learners to practice digital responsibility (including management of personal privacy and respectful behavior), digital literacy (ability to find and vet resources as well as differentiate between valid and questionable resources), organization of online content, collaborating and socializing with subject matter experts and fellow students, and the ability to use online applications to synthesis content and create learning artifacts.

What I’m getting at is this: The comments make the article a learning object (and what I’m doing i remixing demonstrates that) and so address this concern from chedept

How is what is being done here different than, say, what any number of people or groups are doing with sites and blogs. Is Ariana Huffington teaching a course on society and politics? Is Dan Savage teaching a course on human sexuality? Is TMZ teaching a course on whatever it is they waste their time on?

Calling it a course does not make it so.

Huffington isn’t teaching a course – and an open course is not a collection of articles. But incorporating a Huff post article in a course framework, even a loosely defined one, or using a post as stuff to learn from, makes the post part of a course.

The comments seem to be struggling in getting at the mindset behind the open course: Is it like other self-guided courses? How do teachers give feedback to so many? (How do teachers give feedback to self-learners? would be my question.) How do you handle mis-behavior? Again, Drexler answers these matters by demonstrating how: she posts her own comment, remixes them, and in so doing clarifies matters. (It gets a little patronizing, but that’s an effort to make sure the exchange doesn’t erupt in flames.)

I really believe there is a distinction between open teaching and open learning. As a teacher, I could conduct my course in a completely closed environment, but offer my course materials in an open forum that anyone can freely access. Is that open or merely transparent? You begin to see a continnum emerging here. On the other hand, as a highly motivated learner, I could piece together a rich learning experience with open courseware in the absence of a teacher or facilitator. Though at some point, I may have to connect with other learners or subject matter experts who can supplement the materials.

…

The examples in this article represent facilitated open online courses. Facilitation is a key component. Yet, there’s more going on here than the added guidance or scaffolding of an instructor. The connections to others and exposure to many points of view further enrich the learning experience.

Siemens gets in here, bringing in a practice that was overlooked in the article: that of learning communities forming within the course:

Not all 2300 learners stay in the same virtual space talking to each other. They form smaller networks, move into different spaces, or engage with others on topics of personal interest. The instructor does not have to direct all 2300 students. The the key power shift generated by the web is the loss of ability for a company, a person, or an educator to direct people.

What I really like is how the questions in the comments allow Siemens (and others) to compose focused responses. We can see coherence being created here by posting public responses to public questions, by remixing and sharing.

We can still lecture on how to find good information or how to write a persuasive essay. But…instead of the instructor being the sole source of guidance and information, she becomes a node among other nodes (important, even critical, but no longer the only or dominant one) in a learning network.

Also, the list of commentators makes a good starting point for forming learnninng community. And as a further note, the commentators demonstrate that not all learners have to be fully engaged in the course to provide material that can be made meaningful. Side comments can be opened into a larger room by another learner – which also challenges to the idea of course design as a matter of teacher control.

But there is still a sense, throughout, that a MOOC is not really a course so much as a hobby: fun, creative, experimental, tribal, but still side-stepping the Serious Work and Rigor of Properly Designed Courses.

I agree that the best way to evaluate these events (courses?) is to participate in them. I have been a high-flyer in three of them so far. I have enjoyed the interaction, and tend to think of these events as social interactions that produce socially constructed learning, using internet affordances for communication purposes. Since acronyms are all the rage, how about SMILEs, as in Social Media Induced Learning Events. The SMILE acronym helps to highlight for me the fun and creativity I had in the debates in the various forums.

Acronyms make a good heuristics. Here’s one to counterpoint SMILE when it comes to open learning: SMARTS: Study, Mix (or Meet if you prefer), Assess, Remix, Test by Sharing.

But I’ll leave it with this from Siemans. As I mentioned a couple of times in this post (remix, being tested by sharing), I have made the Chronicle article and the comments a learning object by using them for learning. They were not posted to overtly teach me anything.

Why do many educators conclude that coming to a particular place requires set structure? Just because we know what we want students to learn doesn’t mean that we have to inject the into an organized (“aligned”) process of learning outcomes, content/curriculum, evaluation. Nothing about a clear target suggests that a clear structured path is required. We quickly get to the Private Universe problem: pass the test, but miss the conceptual understanding required.

Note to Chronicle: why no “follow up comments via email” option?

George

See also

• Cormier and Siemens, Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement.
• Mackness, Mak, Williams, The Ideals and Reality of Participating in a MOOC (pdf).
• Downes, The Students Own Education (video)

One of the arguments for standardizing on a CMS such as d2l for DE teaching is this: “Using the same interface for all courses means the student has to learn the interface only once.”  The argument I always used against the CMS has been, “A good interface will be designed to suit the content and task, and the task of d2l is to manage students, not enable students to read, listen, or produce. Get a blog, or a wiki.”

But here’s a better one, from Stephen Downes, in Emergent Learning: Social Networks and Learning Networks.

I understand why someone would say this: “To increase the sustainability of portal projects there is a need to ‘work towards establishing common frameworks that will enable applications and services, from different sources, to work together.’” After all, it is precisely that failure that accounts for the indifferent success of community portals, the ‘field of dreams’ scenario, where you build it, and they do not come. But such an enterprise is perhaps best compared with constructing an artificial language: sure, it would make communication easier if evereyone used the standard – but who speaks Esperanto? The growth of community – and hence, community frameworks – is much more organic than that, a product of multiple simultaneous negotiations to create a network of compatible systems rather than a centralized planning department to create a structure.

This argument is similar to the critiques of the artificial, formulaic 5-Paragraph Theme, taught in too many US high schools and even university courses. The problem with the 5-Paragraph Theme is this: It’s an artificial genre, which no one reads (teachers don’t read 5-paragraph themes; they grade them); the form and the exercise aren’t designed to communicate anything other than “I did your assignment.” I know because I have read hundreds of them.  Even when the form is not assigned, even when they are warned against it, Good Students drag out the form as a default. They have to unlearn it before we can make any progress in writing.

But here’s what I find a puzzle: Institutions are using d2l – a paragon of  walled garden ivory tower teaching – to deliver “real world” – that is, situated – education. Courses (such as here, and here) that are pitched as bridging a (purported) gap between classroom and workplace are placed firmly behind the walls of the garden, using the same accouterments, practices, and channels.

Seriously? Some of my colleagues teach some of these courses – well-meaning people who would argue that they are giving learners choices, providing opportunities – and I suppose they are, kind of. Learners will have the opportunity to learn Esperanto.  We can do better than this.

Assignment: Re-reald Prof Morgan’s argument above. What is Morgan’s thesis? How does he support it? What kind of silliness is he passing off as thoughtful consideration? What is he really trying to say? Now, write a 5-Paragraph Theme in which you make clear just how mis-guided Morgan is by considering the benefits of standardized interfaces in education today. Pose. Posture. Beg the Question. 500 words. Typed.

This note on Gardening the wiki, order in chaos from Brian Lamb prompted me to pay a long-overdue return visit to the UBC Wiki. Lamb and colleagues have been developing their wiki like mad. Envy. Particularly interesting is using a Gardening the Wiki blog to support and evangelize the space, with regular news and meta-commentary on the State of the Wiki from their wiki admin Will Engle. Double envy. UBC is making the hard move into open learning, and that’s to be envied.

Wish BSU had the interest and the energy to develop this kind of major project. Our faculty energy goes into developing (closed) courses using D2L. Hardly garden-fresh. More like frozen peas from Wal-Mart.

But the gardener’s role, as exemplified by UBC, will make an appearance when I re-fit the Weblogs and Wikis course next year. Kudos to UBC.

More on gardens at Understanding Nothing, c2.com, Meatball Wiki (zen gardens, walled gardens, gated communities). Then there are FormalGardens, KnotGardens, EnglishGardens, and Follies.

Reading Kress, Multimodiality, I was struck by how his model of semiosis lines up with Downs’s and Siemens’s open course pedagogy of connectivism as it appeared in the critical literacies course earlier this summer.

Here’s Kress’s sketch of the sequence by which semiosis moves:

the recipient’s existing
interest shapes
attention, which produces
engagement leading to
selection of elements from the message, leading to a
framing of these elements, which leads to their
transformation and transduction, which produces a
new (‘inner’) sign.

Or, from the perspective of the interpreter:

interest produces attention;
attention shapes the form of the engagement;
this leads to selections being made;
the selections are framed;
there is the subsequent transformation and transductions of the elements in the frame;
and, in that, the (‘inwardly made’) sign is produced.

The sequence reshapes (aspects) of the initial message, the ‘ground’, into a prompt. Interest is the motive force: it is the basis for attention to the ‘ground’ constituted by the exhibition, for engagement with that ‘ground’; it shapes selection, transformation and transduction; and interest becomes evident in the new sign, the map.

And here’s Stephen Downes’s explanation of how the Critical LIteracies Online Course is designed:

1. Aggregate
We will give you access to a wide variety of things to read, watch or play with…. , what you should do is PICK AND CHOOSE content that looks interesting to you and is appropriate for you. If it looks too complicated, don’t read it. If it looks boring, move on to the next item.

2. Remix
Once you’ve read or watched or listened to some content, your next step is to keep track of that somewhere. How you do this will be up to you.

3. Repurpose
We don’t want you simply to repeat what other people have said. We want you to create something of your own. This is probably the hardest part of the process.

Remember that you are not starting from scratch. Nobody every creates something from nothing. That’s why we call this section ‘repurpose’ instead of ‘create’. We want to emphasize that you are working with materials, that you are not starting from scratch.

4. Feed Forward
We want you to share your work with other people in the course, and with the world at large.

Now to be clear: you don’t have to share. You can work completely in private, not showing anything to anybody. Sharing is and will always be YOUR CHOICE.

I wasn’t going to map Kress’s sequence to the course sequence, but I will: The instruction to aggregate let’s the learner draw on interest to shape her attention, to produce engagement which leads to selection, which slides into remix. Remix and repurpose put the focus on framing the elements of aggregation, to produce a new inner sign – which can then be shared, or not.

This connection between theory of communication and pedagogy – I’m not sure if it’s spurious or not yet –  also gives the vernacular activities aggregate, remix, repurpose, feed forward a pedagogical strength that I hadn’t recognized before.

That’s my morning started.