TAACCT Basic Employability Skills MOOC meeting regarding the pedagogy of MOOCs and the following discussion the on creating the vision of the MOOC

1. Except where otherwise noted these materials
are licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY)
The Pedagogy of MOOCs
This presentation is based on my Pedagogy of MOOCs blog post at:
http://edtechfrontier.com/2013/05/11/the-pedagogy-of-moocs

3. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
2012
The MOOC! The Movie by Giulia Forsythe CC BY-NC-SA
http://nyti.ms/TTn1E7

4. MOOC Timeline
Figure 1 MOOCs and Open Education Timeline p6.jpg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported license.

5. Are MOOCs a “fad” or should they be
taken “seriously”?
2012• Current literature contains references to MOOC-ology and
MOOC-ologists!
• What is needed is an analytical approach to describe the
spread of a diffusion phenomenon
• Use of Diffusion models to ―measure‖ MOOCs have been
traditionally used in the context of sales/adoption
forecasting
• Diffusion metaphors are often more persuasive than
numerical data, analytical models, and formal reasoning
(Eccles & Nohria, 1993)
• Rogers’ S-curve
• Gartner Group’s ―Hyper Cycle‖
• Investment Bubble Phases

6. Rogers’ S-curve
Illustrates diffusion rates over time

7. Gartner Group Education “Hype Cycle”

8. MOOC’s Hype Cycle

9. The Pedagogy of MOOCs
How can you effectively teach thousands of
students simultaneously?
There is a contrast between post-secondary faculty and K-12 teacher contract agreements
that limit class size and the current emergent MOOC aim of having as many enrollments
as possible. What a dichotomy.
How well are MOOC’s doing at successfully
teaching students?
Based on MOOCs equally massive dropout rates having teaching and learning success on
a massive scale will require pedagogical innovation. It’s this innovation, more than massive
enrollments or free that I think make MOOC’s important.

10. MOOCs reach privileged users
• MOOC population tends to be:
• young, well educated, and employed, with a
majority from developed countries.
– In developing countries, about 80 percent of the MOOC
students surveyed already held college degrees
– Significantly more males than females are taking
MOOCs, especially in developing countries.
• Students’ main reasons for taking a MOOC are
advancing in their current job and satisfying
curiosity.
– The individuals the MOOC revolution is supposed to help
the most — those without access to higher education in
developing countries — are underrepresented among the
early adopters.
*According to the research paper “The MOOC Phenomenon: Who Takes Massive Open Online Courses and Why?

11. The Reality of MOOC Participation and
Completion
• 841,687 people registered for the 17 MOOCs from
Harvard and MIT.
• 5 percent of all registrants earned a certificate of
completion.
• 35 percent never viewed any of the course materials.
• 54 percent of those who ―explored‖ at least half of the
course content earned a certificate of completion.
• 66 percent of all registrants already held a bachelor’s
degree or higher.
• 74 percent of those who earned a certificate of
completion held a bachelor’s degree or higher.
• 29 percent of all registrants were female.
• 3 percent of all registrants were from underdeveloped
countries.

12. When building a MOOC remember the audience
MOOCs are actually reaching………
• Few of those who sign up for a course end up
completing it.
• Most MOOC students already hold traditional
degrees.
• Students who sign up for MOOCs are
overwhelmingly male.
Always remember when building a MOOC…
• You are reaching a completely different set of
students
• With different intentions
• Different ways of seeing the instructors
• Different ways of seeing the content of the course

13. MOOC Design History

14. Early MOOCs
http://eci831.ca/
2007
Alec Couros

15. • Open to anyone to participate.
• Some of these early MOOC’s, taught by university
faculty, had tuition paying students taking the course
for university credit who were joined in the the same
class with non-tuition paying, non-credit students who
got to fully participate in a variety of non-formal ways.
Alec Couros pedagogically designed his graduate
course in a way that relies on the participation of non-
credit students.
• Other early MOOC’s were solely offered as a form of
informal learning open to anyone for free without a
for-credit component.
• Openly licensed using Creative Commons licenses
Common Features of Early MOOCs

16. • The learning focuses on knowledge creation and
generation rather than knowledge duplication.
• The course is not conducted in a single place or LMS
environment.
– It is distributed across the web. We will provide some facilities.
– Expectation is that learning activities will be spread over the
internet.
– Learning occurs by visits to other people’s web pages, and even to
create some of your own.
• Four key characteristics
1. autonomy
2. diversity
3. openness
4. connectedness/interactivity
Pedagogy of cMOOCs

17. • A connectivist MOOC course is based on four
major types of activity
1. Aggregate
2. Remix
3. Repurpose
4. Feed Forward.
• Dave Cormier maps out the five steps to success in a
cMOOC –
1. Orient
2. Declare
3. Network
4. Cluster
5. Focus.
• Faculty/facilitators focus on fostering a space for
learning connections to occur.
Pedagogy of cMOOCs

18. Design of cMOOCs
• Learning happens within a
network
• Learners use digital platforms
such as blogs, wikis, social
media platforms to make
connections with content,
learning communities and
other learners to create and
construct knowledge.
• Participant blog posts, tweets
etc. are aggregated by
course organizers and
shared with all participants
via daily email, newsletter,
forum, RSS feed, …
My Twitter Social Ego Networks by David Rodrigues CC BY-NC-SA
Social Learning

19. • In 2011 MOOC’s migrated to the US with Jim Groom’s
DS106 Digital Storytelling at the University of Mary
Washington in Virginia.
• DS106 is a credit course at UMW, but you can also be an
―open participant―. http://ds106.us

20. New Pedagogical Directions
• Rather than assignments
created by faculty, course
assignments are
collectively created by
course participants over all
offerings of the course.
• The Assignment Banks are
online and anyone can
access it.
• Having course participants
collectively build course
assignments for use by
students in future classes is
a hugely significant
pedagogical innovation.
http://assignments.ds106.us

21. MOOCs Go Massive
• Fall of 2011 Stanford Engineering professors offered three
of the school’s most popular computer science courses for
free online as MOOCs – Machine Learning, Introduction to
Artificial Intelligence, and Introduction to Databases
• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered free and
online to students worldwide from October 10th to
December 18th 2011 was the biggest surprise
• Taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig this course
really was massive attracting 160,000 students from over
190 countries https://www.ai-class.com

22. • Pedagogically a step backward
• Design is
–Watch video lecture recordings,
–read course materials,
–complete assignments,
– take quizzes and an exam
Stanford MOOC Pedagogy

23. The rich pedagogical innovations from
earlier MOOC’s
• Stanford simply migrated campus-based didatic
methods of teaching to the online environment
– Absence of any effort to utilize the rich body of
research on how to teach online effectively
• didactic, lecture based methods of teaching
does not transfer well to online
Stanford MOOC design left
out…..

24. • Sebastian Thrun
leaves Stanford and
raises venture capital
to launch Udacity
• Mission to bring
accessible,
affordable, engaging,
and highly effective
higher education to
the world.
https://www.udacity.com
It is interesting to note…..

25. • Udacity courses include lecture videos,
quizzes and homework assignments.
– Multiple short (~5 min.) video sections make up
each course unit.
– All Udacity courses are made up of distinct units =
a week’s worth of instruction and homework.
– Since Udacity enrollment is open, you can take as
long as you want to complete.
– Include discussion forums and a wiki for course
notes, additional explanations, examples and
extra materials.
– Each course has an area where instructors can
make comments but the pedagogical emphasis is
on self-study.
Pedagogy (design) of a Udacity MOOC

26. • Courses do have an informal discussion forum where
students can post any ideas and thoughts they have
about the course, ask questions, and receive feedback
from other students
• Free participation is non-credit
• A few courses can be taken for credit (from California
institutions) for a fee and Udacity now requires $150 for
a completion certificates
• Udacity offers job placement service in partnership with
various employers
Other MOOC model improvements

27. • Late December 2011 MIT announced edX
• Aim of letting thousands of online learners take
laboratory-intensive courses, while assessing their
ability to work through complex problems, complete
projects, and write assignments.
• October 2013, 76 courses, 29 partners
https://www.edx.org/

28. • As with other MOOC style offerings edX students
won’t have interaction with faculty or earn credit
toward an MIT degree.
• For a small fee students can take an assessment
which, if successfully completed, will provide them
with a certificate from edX.
• edX offers honor code certificates, ID verified
certificates, and XSeries certificates (successfully
completing a series of courses)
• edX platform used to conduct experiments on how
students learn and how faculty can best teach.
Assessing course data, from mouse clicks to time
spent on tasks, to evaluating how students respond
to various assessments.
Pedagogy of edX

29. • Initial edX aim was to improve teaching and learning
of tuition paying on-campus students. Have revised
aim to developing best practices to enhance the
student experience and improve teaching and
learning both on campus and online
• Pedagogy very similar to Udacity
• Regrettably the rich body of research about online
learning is not being used
• Focus of edX so far is not on pedagogy but on
engineering an open source MOOC platform
Pedagogy of edX

30. • April 2012 Stanford computer science professors
Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller launch Coursera as an
educational technology company offering MOOCs.
• Oct 2013 have 5,112,216 Courserians, 461 courses,
and 91 partners

31. • Video lectures, mastery learning, and peer assessment.
• Retrieval and testing for learning. Interaction = the video
frequently stops, and students are asked to answer a
simple question to test whether they are tracking the
material.
• Coursera provides university partners with a flipped
classroom. MOOC handles the lecture, course reading,
some assessment & peer-to-peer interaction for campus-
based tuition paying students. On-campus activities
focused more on active learning & instructor help.
• Non-tuition paying open participants have no active
learning component. Students are tossed a tidbit of social
learning in the form of discussion forums.
Pedagogy of Coursera

32. • Completing learners - attempt the majority of the
assessments offered in the class
• Auditing learners - attempt assessments infrequently, if
at all but watch lectures throughout the course
• Disengaging learners - attempt assessments at the
beginning of the course but then move to sparsely
watching lectures or disappear from the course entirely
• Sampling learners - briefly explore the course by
watching a few videos, either at the beginning of the
course or while it is underway
• No Shows - enroll but never actively engage with any of
the course materials (study indicated 30-43%) ref: Schneider, Stanford,
2013
4 Prototypical learners in MOOCs

33. Design of CHAMP MOOCs

34. Typical Development Hours
Hours Purpose
2-10 Creating proposal, consultation with platform support, and
basic design overview for the course
5-15 Designing or redesigning the specifics of the instructional
approach for the course.
2-4 Logistical planning with platform support and ed. Tech
8 hours for each hour
of course content
Content development-identifying, obtaining and creating text,
graphics, illustrations, animations, video, music, graphs,
charts, etc….to be used in the course
4-5 hours for each hour
of course content
Recording the videos (assuming content is developed and the
speaker/narrator knows the material)
2 hours for each hour
of course content
Post-production for editing recordings, and encoding the
project as a playable video
2-3 hours for each hour
of course content
Publishing content- gathering and uploading materials, adding
quizzes and assignments, creating instructions for students,
etc….

35. MOOC Production
• Create a dynamic course planning document to manage
tasks, timelines, work products, upload deadlines
• Include required fields or submission formats of the OER
repository (meta data, authors, key words)
• Create single institutional accounts for all collaborators
to upload products
• Videos
– Consider accessibility for videos
• transcripts and captioning?
– Find alternatives to YouTube if you anticipate a world wide
audience

36. Are MOOCs Really Open?
No, all rights reserved.
No, non-OER license.
No, all rights reserved.
Note: some institutions using CC anyway.
Yes, CC BY or CC BY-SA
Partial, CC BY-NC on some
Most MOOCs are open only in the sense of free enrollment.
No, all rights reserved.

37. 4 essential elements for a successful MOOC:
• Autonomy-students decide how much to participate
• Diversity-students come from all backgrounds, different
countries, different experiences
• Openness-MOOCs should be free or of such low costs
that nearly anyone can participate
• Interactivity-Chats, social networking, video meetings,
collaboration
Downes’ MOOC Model

38. • Learning is not just acquiring a body of knowledge and
skills. Learning happens through relationships.
• Online learning pedagogies can be incredibly social
even more so than campus-based courses - MOOCs
should use this long-standing practice
• The best online pedagogies are those that use the open
web and relationship to mine veins of knowledge,
expertise, and connections between students, between
students and the instructor, and between students and
others on the open web.
• Socio-constructivist and connectivist learning theories
acknowledge and embrace the social nature of
learning.
• Use social learning including blogs, chat, discussion
Recommendations for MOOC Pedagogy

39. • Use peer-to-peer pedagogies over self study. We
know this improves learning outcomes. The cost of
enabling a network of peers is the same as that of
networking content – essentially zero.
• Be as open as possible. Use open pedagogies that
leverage the entire web not just the specific content
in the MOOC platform.
• Use OER and openly license your resources using
Creative Commons licenses in a way that allows
reuse, revision, remix, and redistribution.
• Leverage massive participation – have all students
contribute something that adds to or improves the
course overall.
Recommendations for MOOC Pedagogy

40. Platform
• Functions, assets, limitations
• Training for instructors
Communication during course
• Platform info, FAQ’s, how tos
• Student Communication: email? discussions?
• Clarify level of communication that students can
expect
• Clarify who to contact for what
• Clarify typical daily/weekly hours spent in the MOOC
• Meetups, office hours?
• Trouble reports
MOOC Development

41. Course norms & expectations
• Honor Code – does the course have one or does your institution
require one
• Visibility – what is public/private? Open to enrollees? Access to
student work? Access to scores/assessments?
• Intellectual Property – who owns what (students, all, instructors)
licensing?
• Citing external resources – provide expectations & resources
• Promote & model positive communications - plan for handling
negative communication
• Prevent & response to cases of students using the OPEN
platform to take advantage of others or furthering individual
interests
MOOC Development 2

42. Instructional Goals
• ―reach vs. rigor‖
Syllabus
• Design to include global and online environmental considerations
• Schedules
Reading Assignments
• Will reading be assigned? If so, is ALL reading free and available online?
• If using scholarly articles not available online, what is the copyright, distribution,
& cost to students
• Consider availability of book reading assignments due to international
enrollment
Assessments and Surveys
• Assignments and Assessments
– Number?
– Grading? Peer review?
• Surveys
– What info will be collected? What are the goals for collecting data?
– Factor in attrition rates and end-of-course biases
MOOC Development 3

43. Course Promotion
• Map out audiences
• Prepare blurbs
• Reach out to relevant blogs & news sources
• Reach out via social media
– Course pages on Twitter, Facebook,
Google+
– Who will set up, manage, post?
• Coordinate with communications department
MOOC Delivery 2

44. Four Barriers That MOOCs Must
Overcome To Build a Sustainable Model
Phil Hill http://mfeldstein.com/four-barriers-that-moocs-must-overcome-to-become-sustainable-model
Need pedagogically based business models.

45. Practical Institution Recommendations
• Organize an inter-disciplinary group/committee to
evaluate MOOC options and recommend a particular
MOOC provider/platform
• Define purpose of doing MOOCs
• Design a MOOC pedagogical strategy
• Initial MOOCs may come from academic areas
already engaged in online learning – commerce,
medicine, …
• Alternatively MOOCs could showcase courses that
highlight what makes instituion special and unique

46. Conclusions
MOOC Phenomenon has created dialogues:
• Value of OER
• Strategies to address the rising cost of higher
education
• ―Just in time‖ learning
• Learning for professional development, distant, and
continuing education
• Benefiting from ―crowdsourcing‖ education with group
learning, peer to peer, peer to instructor, instructor to
instructor

47. Employability Skills for Industry MOOC
• Description:
– Employability skills are those basic skills necessary for getting, keeping, and doing well
on a job. Entry-level employees with good personal skills have confidence in
themselves and deal with others honestly and openly, displaying respect for
themselves, their co-workers, and their supervisors regardless of other people’s
diversity and individual differences. They view themselves as a part of a team and are
willing to work within the culture of the group. They have a positive attitude and take
the initiative to learn new things to get the job done. They also have the ability to set
goals and priorities in their work and personal lives so that resources of time, money
and other resources may be conserved and managed. These individuals practice good
personal habits, come to work as scheduled, on time and dressed appropriately, and
are agreeable to change when necessary. This MOOC will help identify those skills you
have and those skills you may need to work on so you can do well in industry jobs.
• Target Dates:
– *Review 1: August 18, 2014
– * Open for enrollment on canvas.net: August 25, 2014
– * Review 2: September 15, 2014
– * Start date: October 20, 2014
– * End date: December 1, 2014