Getting Stuck in the MOOC

You can’t read a blog post or article about education and technology without MOOCs being mentioned.  Classroom educators and corporate trainers drop the term more frequently than “pedagogy”.  It’s become so commonplace, it has almost become meaningless – used to describe any learning and technology combination that isn’t a next-button Captivate module.  However, I find myself frequently hearing it misused, with acronym-dropping learning professionals using MOOC to describe everything from Khan Academy and flipped classrooms to actual MOOCs.

While I understand the difference between flipped classrooms and MOOCs, I had not actually participated in one.  To that end, I enrolled in the e-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC from Cousera #EDUMOOC.  This 5 week MOOC was a great place to get my feet wet and immerse myself in a type of learning I had only read about.  The experience was enlightening, with both positive and negative aspects, about MOOCs, the content, and myself.

Positives

The thing I found most enjoyable about the MOOC is the same thing that I found enjoyable in my own academic experiences and teaching career: the curated content.  With a team of five individuals running the MOOC, there was no shortage of interesting videos, articles, and researched shared to help shape our thinking or prompt our conversations.  The media were almost all engaging, thought provoking, and well selected.  Looking only at the materials shared and the questions asked, one could get a good amount from the course.

The course itself was also well organized.  Despite the relatively short nature of the course, the weeks were organized into two blocks in order to focus our attention on Utopias and Dystopias (weeks 1-2) and Being Human (weeks 3-4).  The final week was dedicated to an assignment.  During each week, despite the variety of content, students were asked to engage with a minimum of two pieces of content in order to participate.  Despite the fact that there was enough content to sufficiently run a traditional university course, the instructors recognized that unrealistic expectations regarding time would be met with falling student interest. 

The platform itself was simple to use, allowing the content to freely pass through from the instructors to the students.  While there were no exciting features from the interface itself, it allowed for content to be written, images to be shared, and links to be embedded.  In a situation such as this, the biggest compliment to system is that it was nearly invisible, providing an uninhibited look at the content of the course.

Negatives

Overall, I give the eLearning and Digital Cultures course an ‘A’, the concept of a MOOC a ‘B-‘, and my participation a ‘D’.  For me, it was the M and the C that provided the most frustration with the experience. 

There is no doubt that participation in the course could be defined as ‘massive’.  With over 42,500 registered participants, I can assure you the course participation felt very overwhelming.  While there was a good deal of content provided by the instructors, a lot of the learning in a MOOC (or in life) comes from interactions with others.  In this MOOC, those interactions took place primarily in the discussion boards.  Posting and replying were simple, but there was no way to digest the torrent of posts from others in the MOOC.  To that end, you were left following a couple of threads or reading responses in the threads you participated.  While not a horrid experience, I was continually left with the feeling that I was missing something – not just ‘something’, but nearly everything. 

Compounding the massiveness of the student participation was the default arrangement of the posts in the discussion board – oldest first.  While this kept you from feeling like you couldn’t keep up because there were so many new posts at the top of the screen, it also meant that the most active threads were the oldest ones.  So, if you wanted to contribute something insightful, chances of many eyes even seeing your post were minimal unless they re-sorted the discussion board.  True, this can simply be done by the single click of an easy-to-find button, but with web usage, one click can make all the difference in visibility. 

Even with the massive participation in the MOOC, my own participation was lackluster.  Despite early attempts to engage with the other participants in the course through the forums and a continued interest in the materials being shared by the instructors, it seems that life just got in the way.  With work and family, the amount of time I had to dedicate to the MOOC wasn’t what it needed to be to participate to a level I would expect of myself for a normal course.  Much like students who enroll in online education believing it is the solution to their availability to attend synchronous class, my own expectation was that I could participate by grazing.  I did, and while my experience was certainly the poorer for it, I did get an understanding of how MOOCs work and some of the very interesting content shared by the instructors.

Overall

I found the MOOC content and the MOOC itself to be very interesting.  While I certainly need to make adjustments to my own time to fully participate, until the MOOC is a priority, that probably won’t be a reality.  Will I participate in another MOOC?  Absolutely!

For the perspective of a very active class participant, I recommend taking a look at The Accidental Technologist blog from Wayne Barry.  For a better understanding of the planning and running of this MOOC, the EDUMOOC team ran a blog that can be found on Wordpress.