A MOOC by Any Other Name...

We’ll start MOOC MOOC by working synchronously and asynchronously to co-create a single short essay about MOOCs, a wild experiment in mass-collaboration.

One day. A mass of folks in a Google Doc. 1 essay.

If you’re new to Google Docs, and want a bit of helpful advice, take a look at Jesse Stommel’s article, Theorizing Google Docs: 10 Tips for Navigating Online Collaboration. Here are a couple of important highlights:

“A potential pitfall of this sort of work is a variation of the bystander effect, whereby participants will see a problem or gap in the document but assume someone else will fix it. The more collaborators involved, the more the effect is amplified.” So, make sure to jump in where you see you’re needed!

“Embrace chaos. There is something slightly crazy about a shared writing space, especially when there are more than 2 contributing authors. A Google Doc can seem to write itself, a new digital ecosphere that bubbles with lively and chaotic energy. I’m frequently startled when I leave a Google Doc to realize that it will go on without me. If you haven’t collaborated within a Google Doc ... Don’t be surprised when weird and sometimes wondrous things begin to happen.”

Ready? Set. Go!

Instructions:

1. Consider these questions: What is a MOOC? What does it do, and what does it not do?

2. Collaborate as a group (a potentially very large group) in this document to write one exactly 1000-word essay that responds to both questions. (For a word count at any point, highlight the body of the essay, then go to Tools > Word Count in the main menu.)

3. Somewhere in the essay, reference (quote or cite) each of the following articles:

• Let's Talk about MOOC (online) Education--And Also About Massively Outdated Traditional Education (MOTEs) - by Cathy Davidson
• What’s the Matter with MOOCs? - by Siva Vaidhyanathan
• The Language of MOOCs - by Audrey Watters

4. Include (and attribute) a single picture chosen via http://search.creativecommons.org/.

5. Revise and title the finished essay. Keep these instructions at the top of the document.

All this before 6:00 PM Eastern time.

Our Essay

A MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) is an online event^[a][b], often involving several hundred people or more, primarily for the purposes of sharing, learning, collaborating, and discussing content organized around a theme or topic, which is usually designed such that participation is open (define your own schedule, participation and engagement level) and has comparatively few boundaries to entry or participation (with notable exceptions being computer & Internet access, plus some minor level of skill).  It seems likely that some subjects may be better suited to MOOCs, just as some students and educators may be better fits.  It will be crucial to keep these limitations in mind as educators and students (and administrators and politicians) consider the potentials and pitfalls of MOOCs.  

MOOCs likely work best for self-directed learners who want to focus on learning more, obtaining new perspectives on a topic of interest or obtaining a new skill, and who are interested in networking/collaborating with others of similar interests.  Learners who are naturally outgoing--or at least confident inserting themselves into group discussions--are more likely to derive the greatest level of satisfaction in the context of a MOOC.

As Audrey Watters points out on her blog, there are multiple styles of MOOCs, all of which are designed to achieve slightly different learning outcomes.  Some focus on the acquisition of a specific set of skills--learning a computer language, for example--while others merely serve as the occasion for like-minded people to network and share resources about a given topic or set of ideas^[c]. These promote the free exchange of ideas and also ask participants to engage in thoughtful reflection about their own learning.  Still others try to recreate the classroom experience, by importing tried and true pedagogies, such as lectures by well known authorities in a given field or a set of demonstrations on how to do task X, and framing these with a set of questions that can be graded by computer.

Benefits of MOOCs

MOOCs allow students to collaborate using tools that go beyond traditional small-group discussions, opening up that collaboration to ideas from a wider variety of inputs than a classroom environment. Depending on the definition of “open” being used (Watters), a MOOC can arguably include any number of collaborators, limited only by the constraints of the LMS or other technology used for the goal.

Limitations of MOOCs

Limits to MOOCs--what they can’t do--is offer the kind of one-on-one attention that faculty can give to students in smaller courses.^[d][e]  Because of the scale of a MOOC, students must seek their primary, and perhaps only, direct engagement through their peers.  This kind of interaction is exciting, but it is also limited by the abilities and commitment of the peers making up any individual group.  As Mike James notes, the effectiveness of community support in a MOOC is determined by a number of “arbitrary and accidental factors,” such as community interest and a participant’s ability to formulate a question (James).    As Viswanathan points out in his polemic, “Education is the creation of habits of thought and methods of inquiry that yield unpredictable results. We offer diplomas to people upon completion of a rigorous and diverse set of intellectual experiences—not the mere accumulation of a series of facts and techniques. Education is certainly not an injection of information into a passive receptacle.”^[f]

Students looking for academic credentials will be sorely disappointed in the MOOC model, which is designed to facilitate lifelong learning. Some of the corporate MOOCs, like those offered by Coursera, edX, and Udacity, are trying to find ways to credential the type of learning that their MOOCs facilitate ^[g]by investigating the potential of online badges as digital currency (someone we read has said this, but I can’t quite remember who it was)!  Unless there’s an agreed upon equivalence with either traditional college credit from accredited institutions or a new system of digital literacy standards that employers or other interested parties develop, the primary reward of student participation in MOOCs will be the individual learning a given student achieves.

Another consideration, from the student perspective, is that the MOOC needs to fit the learning desired by the student.  Students will need to understand that there are different styles of MOOCs available.  Some MOOCs operate as an online version of a traditional course, with lectures, exams, and some discussion,^[h] for example, EdX.  Other MOOCs are oriented towards connectivity (both connections with the course content and other students in the course), i.e., Marc Bousquet and Sean Michael Morris.  This consideration will require the student to be aware of the different types of MOOCs.  As facilitators of MOOCs it is important to think about how this message is provided to potential students.  

Another limitation looked at from the student perspective is that some kinds of students don’t receive the support they need in this environment. Also, looking at the positives listed above, we could list things like technological skills, information literacy skills, and limited or no access to equipment limit some participants.

There is also the limit of institutions having the available technology to offer courses with a thousand or more students in a MOOC. Although, according to Dave Cormier’s What is a MOOC? video, an LMS is not required for a MOOC. A sometimes overlooked online course design constraint is that the designer can't be 100% sure what learners bring to the table in terms of computer and software. If you're going OPEN then you need to not go with proprietary objects like Adobe Flash.

Administrative Considerations

Some professors and some administrations are not supportive of online learning. Amyra Woods wrote today in The South End, “Fifty-eight percent of faculty members surveyed said online education is more fearful than exciting.” She also cites survey results from Inside Higher Ed that only 29% of traditional faculty think that online courses can “be as effective as the face-to-face education.” That makes MOOCs an even harder sell if the majority of typical faculty members don’t believe online education is a viable option.  At the same time, politicians and business leaders are energized by what they see as the potential for MOOCs, believing they offer a real alternative to the rapidly escalating costs of higher education, forgetting both the enormous costs of setting up a truly excellent MOOC and the fact that MOOCs are not yet generating any revenue for participating institutions (Viswanathan).  

While our definition of MOOC focuses on the online connectivity there is space to adapt this single mode model to incorporate the classroom model. This second prong could give faculty the space to interact, discuss, and connect that their traditional lectures have not allowed. [See: Foucault’s woes at if Foucault ran a MOOC]

A digital certificate currently provided upon completion of some MOOC courses may lead the way; employers may see such certificates as indicators of initiative, self-directed, motivated employees.  Is it more important to have the skill/attribute/learning or the credit?  It will be interesting to see what happens in the hiring and promotion process with respect to MOOC accreditation.  

At the end of his post, Vaidhyanathan references Socrates and his fears about writing as a disruption to education.  The connection to the ancient Greek philosopher is an important one, but perhaps for a different reason.  At their best, MOOCs have the potential to fulfill the Socratic ideal of an educational resource available to all who are open to learning and to engaging in the construction of knowledge.  To do so, though, we will have to experiment with the form, to make these courses more interactive, to stress the importance of participation as the foundation of learning.  Otherwise, MOOCs will succumb to what they can be at their worst, which is simply a chimera or an educational fad.

A cluster of neurons...a pictorial representation of the connections in a MOOC: