FutureLearn educator roles: Why learners prefer to engage with educators and notlead-educators or mentors

1. FutureLearn educator roles: Why learners
prefer to engage with educators and not
lead-educators or mentors
Fereshte Goshtasbpour
@GFereshte
FLAN (November 2020)

2. 2
01 Background and previous findings
02 FutureLearn instructor roles
03 Learner engagement with FutureLearn
instructor roles
04
Content
Q&A

3. 3
Background
 A doctoral study examining what MOOC instructors do in discussion areas
and how learners react to them
1. How are instructors’ contributions to the discussions in MOOCs
characterised based on the Community of Inquiry framework?
i. To what extent and in what ways do instructors contribute to MOOC
discussions?
ii. How do the level and type of their contributions change during a
MOOC?
2. What roles do the instructors’ contributions to discussions play in
learning?
3. To what extent, and in what ways, do learners engage with instructors’
contributions to discussions?

4. 4
Background: Research design
Mixed method approach:
• Hybrid content analysis of conversations between instructors and learners
• Interviews with instructors
Data:
3 x 3-week MOOCs (history, business, arts)
818 online conversations
12 x interviews with instructors

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Background: Research design

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Background: Theoretical framework
Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework
Describes learning and teaching through the three interdependent elements of
social, teaching and cognitive presences.
Social presence is concerned with the development of interpersonal and
purposeful relationships during an online learning experience for open and free
communications. It consists of: personal, open and cohesive communications.
Teaching presence: focuses on the design of educational experience before the
course (design and organisation) and facilitation of learning during the course
(facilitating discourse and direct instruction)
Cognitive presence: reflects learners’ development of
higher-order thinking and includes four phases:
triggering event, exploration, integration, and resolution.

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Background: Research design

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Background: Research design

9. • Instructors do not focus equally on the social and teaching contributions,
and there is an imbalance between the social and content-related support
that learners receive.
• The lower level of teaching contributions means that the academic support
to move learners through the stages of higher-order thinking is not strong.
Goshtasbpour, Swinnerton and Morris
(2019:234)

10. Discussion activities are
socially oriented. However, the
high level of social presence is
due to frequent use of simple
group cohesion strategies such
as greetings and vocatives.
learners feel comfortable
sharing and exchanging
information, but are not
encouraged to form a
community.
Goshtasbpour, Swinnerton and Morris
(2019:234)

11. Teaching contributions are not
balanced in their focus on
facilitating the learning
discourse and providing direct
instruction.
• learners are mostly supported
but not challenged in their
thinking.
• the academic leadership
required to move learners
through the phases of inquiry
is weak.

12. Instructors’ contributions to
discussion areas and learner
engagement with them

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The influence of instructor roles on learner engagment
• learners do not engage with the majority of instructors’ contributions
(58%), most likely because:
• they may simply become lost in the large volume of comments
• they do not meet learners’ needs
• they do not encourage a learner response (acknowledge or give
type rather than demands or requests)
* learner engagement is most evident when the contributions are
focused on both teaching and social presences*

14. Learners engage with the “educators” the most! Why?
1. Content of educators’ contributions
• Their comments contain the highest teaching and cognitive presences and
the lowest number of social indicators.
• The noticeable feature of their teaching presence is the higher level of
direct instruction and lower-level facilitating discourse, compared to other
instructors. This means that they adopt a directive style in discussion areas
and provide the academic leadership that learners require.
• Their cognitive contributions contain most instances of triggering events
and integration and the least cases of exploration. This is indicative of
educators’ focus on initiating the inquiry process and then helping learners
synthesise the information they explored (contrary to lead educators and
mentors, who primarily help learners explore a concept or topic)
Goshtasbpour, Swinnerton and Morris (2019:238)

15. Learners engage with the “educators” the most! Why?
2. Educators’ prompting strategy: they invite other learners to conversations
considerably more than lead educators and mentors do and focus their
efforts less on encouraging learners already engaged in a conversation to
continue it

16. Learners engage with the “educators” the most! Why?
3. Educators’ success in holding longer conversations: They are more
successful than mentors and lead educators in encouraging turn-taking
and increasing the potential for collaborative activities (the lowest number
of short and the highest number of medium-length conversations).
4. Educators’ position with the hierarchy of instructor roles: They are not at
the top of the role hierarchy like lead educators, who could be intimidating
for learners, and they are not as subordinate as mentors, with their less
extensive experience or knowledge
FutureLearn instructor roles
• Lead Educator or Educator: an academic with a specialist knowledge of
the course subject
• Mentor: an academic with a good understanding of the course subject,
who can help guide discussions
• Host – a facilitator who understands the FutureLearn platform and can
act as a guide to learners

17. THANK YOU

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Articles
• Goshtasbpour, F., Swinnerton, B. and Morris, N. (2019). Look who’s talking: exploring
instructors’ contributions to Massive Open Online Courses. British Journal of
Educational Technology. DOI:10.1111/bjet.12787
• Goshtasbpour, F. (2019). Exploring instructors’ contributions to Massive Open Online
Courses. [available at] https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/exploring-instructors-
contributions-to-massive-open-online-courses