Designing for the unknown learner

University teachers are faced with the problem of “knowing” their learners when teaching on a MOOC. This paper explores what the University of Edinburgh has come to know about its recent MOOC participants, highlighting one particular course described by some participants as “a cMOOC on an xMOOC platform”. The paper draws attention to barriers and enablers from co-existent understandings and expectations of course design, and from an abundance of Characteristics of people who claim to have found the MOOC a positive experience are compared with those who have not. Mixed messages about teacher presence may have implications that go beyond MOOCs. The authors contemplate whether MOOCs engender a “cohort effect”, or whether the participant group should better be thought of as a single massive multivocal entity. at all. The course designer’s job is to create appropriate tasks to set before the learner; the role of the teacher is as an “orchestrator of experience” (Caine & Caine, 1994). Further, the sociocultural elaboration of constructivism suggests that this active learning is best conducted within a social context, in which learners work together to explore their developing understanding, through the tutorial engagement of teacher and student, or in an ongoing ballet of reciprocal peer tutoring, in which the learner is supported by a peer or colleague more knowledgeable in the immediate epistemological domain. Author and online activist Cory Doctorow famously and succinctly sums up this pattern of experience: Content is not king. Conversation is king. Content is just what we talk about. This paper draws on some conversations among MOOC participants, their teachers and the public to explore how those participants are constructing their understandings of the MOOC itself. It considers how teachers and course designers attempt to get to know their learners at scale. This is set in the context of a University supported initiative, enabling us to draw insight from not one but six very different courses, led by academics from across the University of Edinburgh’s three Colleges. We explore what we know about learners who chose to participate in MOOCs at the University of Edinburgh – who they are, why they did a MOOC and what they thought of it. We particularly highlight one of these six courses – E-learning and Digital Cultures – where the tensions between a social constructivist perspective and an instructionist-inspired platform have had an impact on both design and delivery of the course. We ask what was distinctive about the participants on this course and ultimately question whether the learners we have started to get to know are similar to those who are likely to come later – and indeed whether they were the students for whom the course was originally designed. As educators, we are having to revisit our own perspectives on course design to take account of dents has been doing this as well. Designing for the Unknown Learner Hamish Macleod, Jeff Haywood, Amy Woodgate and Christine Sinclair 246 Experience Track | The idea of the MOOC emerged as a response to the power of networked connectivity as an engine to drive highly motivated, personally relevant and socially situated learning. While this shares some of the precepts of social constructivism, there are those who argue that a new paradigm is required for thinking about learning (and therefore course design) for the 21st century (Siemens, 2005). The theory of connectivism espoused and practised by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in the initial phase of MOOCs has been contrasted with the model of teaching exposed through the burgeoning MOOC offerings coming from organizations such as Coursera, Udacity and EdX. Certainly on the surface these appear to be rather instructionist in their conceptualisalization. Although liberal and inclusive in intent (often promoted as addressing global problems related to lack of access to educational opportunity), their combination of curation of resources and administration of objective testing presents a very different picture of the potential of the online, the open, and the massive from that of the original MOOCs. This has led George Siemens (2012) to coin the distinction between the original cMOOC (connectivist) and the xMOOC (continuing a pattern started by EdX with a more traditional focus on “knowledge duplication”). Thus, although MOOCs are just a few years old, by 2012 there were already many competing pedagogical approaches underpinning their course design. This opened up scope for confusion in terms of expectations and norms in relation to MOOCs. When they signed up to run six distinctive MOOCs through Coursera, managers, teachers and administrators at the University of Edinburgh discovered that there were distinctive participant expectations of how courses would operate. These expectations came not only from previous experiences of MOOCs but also from previous experiences of being a student in more conventional academic settings. In addition, the Coursera platform encapsulated some of the xMOOC practices in the affordances it provided for materials and activities. While very open to new ideas, Coursera were clear about their expectations of professional-level video recordings (usually very content-based), objective computer-marked tests and peer-assessed assignments. MOOCs (MOOCs@Edinburgh Group, 2013) draws attention to the different approaches to course design and structure adopted by the experienced teams: two from each of the University’s three Colleges. Table 1 is taken from this report and illustrates considerable variation; the E-learning column stands out as particularly different because of the novel curriculum design of the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC. Rather than video lectures, the team curated, introduced and questioned freely-available the course. Some experimental use of media and activities occurred across the six MOOCs, but the team for E-Learning and Digital Cultures (soon abbreviated to EDCMOOC) extended the scope of their design well beyond the Coursera Platform. By using blogs, Twitter, Google hangouts and other social media, the team encouraged connection among participants in ways more in keeping with a cMOOC approach. Indeed, the participants connected themselves – and then reported that EDC was a cMOOC on an xMOOC platform: see Sara Roegiers’ blog: http:// sararoe.wordpress. com/2013/02/27/on-how-edcMOOC-did-a-cMOOC-on-coursera/ Sara’s blog itself provides an example of how the work extended beyond the Coursera platform, and also points of EDCMOOC were students and educators. Though the course was aimed at people interested in education as el undergraduate group. However, an initial survey by the University of Edinburgh of those who had signed up for the MOOCs indicated that 61 per cent of participants on EDCMOOC had postgraduate degrees and 60 per cent were employed in education. Across the six MOOCs, education was an area of employment for just 17 per cent of participants and those with postgraduate degrees were just 40 per cent, though this latter is still much higher than the rhetoric about MOOCs might suggest. The educational focus of EDCMOOC certainly meant that teachers were attracted who were themselves already engaged in or contemplating MOOC activity. A number of participants reported in blogs and forums that they were not “typical” learners as they were just looking existing knowledge about the topics presented and even the activities involved were not really new to them. While the openness of a MOOC means that the university does not exclude participants on the basis of low previous academic achievement or experience, it also cannot exclude vious academic experience. This raises the question: is it *E-learning & Digital Cultures used a novel curriculum design. Source: MOOCs@Edinburgh Group, 2013, p.11 Table 1: Comparison of course structures employed across Edinburgh MOOCs Designing for the Unknown Learner Hamish Macleod, Jeff Haywood, Amy Woodgate and Christine Sinclair 247 Experience Track | possible to build a learning environment in which all levels act? It could be a marvellous opportunity for reciprocal It is important to acknowledge, however, that at this early stage we do not know how typical these patterns of to an open course turn out to be very different from those who come later.