When is a MOOC not a MOOC?

 (What MOOC means to me)

I have to admit I would not be drawn to a blog post entitled so vacuously as, "what MOOC means to me"  (so I thought up something catchy and made the real purpose of this post its subtitle). However, it's early days for working out what MOOC means for anyone.  People have different ideas about what MOOC means, period.  Obviously, the most relevant meaning is the one that reaches any one of us personally.  MOOC means a lot to me, I'm going to try to pin down that meaning here, and maybe this will help you get your own grip on what MOOC might mean to you.

John Hibbs and I presented on the topic November 14, 2012, at the Global Education Conference (http://www.globaleducationconference.com/, which Steve Hargadon has pointed out, is a conference on global education, not an international conference particularly).  John has prepared a few documents on his own blog:

• Our proposal, which John mainly wrote, with my feedback and input, is here: http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/29/moocs-global-ed-conference-presentation/#more-623
• John's "Willy Sutton" post: http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/13/crown-jewels-21st-century-diploma-mills/
• John wrote out his talk for the GEC conference and blogged it here:
  http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/#more-682

Here are our session artifacts:

• The Bb Collaborate recording is here:
• https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/nativeplayback.jnlp?sid=2008350&psid=2012-11-14.0429.D.53B5764000FF19A76D1D92E78857D7.vcr 
• TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/2012nov14gec
• Our slide show, revised after the presentation:
  http://www.slideshare.net/vances/the-new-frontier-of-mooc 
• The mp3 version of the presentation is podcast here:
  http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/index/2012-11-15T07_04_05-08_00 

MOOCs for ESOL and language learning

There are two thrusts to the presentation.  One is that an excellent audience for MOOCs might be in ESOL and language learning in general.  To my knowledge, this is indeed an avenue not particularly explored or developed as MOOC, though my own online credentials stem from what might be viewed as one of many precursors to MOOCs.  Dave Cormier takes credit in the "The True History of the MOOC" for invention of the term MOOC in the spring of 2008 (mp3 available, http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300).  He does point out that there have been many MOOC-like configurations for learning since the 19th century, but that the term MOOC to describe them began with his inspiration, which Leigh Blackall says (in A True(er) History of Moocs http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html), that MOOC's emergence as a meme for universities and businesses, has become 'irritating'.  I have argued that we had MOOCs before 2008 as well, one example being http://study.com, which offered language lessons to all comers, and which spawned Writing for Webheads, which started leaving artifacts online in 1998 <http://prosites-vstevens.homestead.com/files/efi/webheads.htm>.  So regarding what MOOC means to me, one interest I have in it is as a platform for what we were doing in 1998, when we were experimenting with platforms for teaching people ESOL and other languages for free online.

It was around this time that I became aware of John Hibbs's work in the pre-MOOC era.  John had created a web page from which he launched a virtual ship each year to make a journey around the world hour by hour in 24 time zones <http://www.bfranklin.edu/gld8/gld8.htm>.  He had organized people in different parts of the world to manage the program for that region and in 1999 I was tapped by the Middle East organizer Neil Hynd to make a presentation of some kind.  I remember that the first one I did, I was patched into the stream through a POTS phone line, but in subsequent years John was using Real Player for streaming the audio, Though our team again presented in 2001 from Abu Dhabi using a POTS phone patch, we listened via Real Player. At the time this was impressive stuff, right on the cutting edge. John was one of the first pioneers of free (that was unusual!) online seminars of educators who could meet in real time through his web pages. John's effort stimulated me to do something similar in organizing three WiAOC's (Webheads in Action Online Convergence), each one a 3-day round the clock free all-volunteer online conference that I coordinated in 2005, 2007, and 2009 <http://wiaoc.org>.

Webheads in Action (WiA, http://webheads.info) came about in response to the fact that an emerging community of educators had started overwhelming the ESOL student voices in the original  Writing for Webheads community.  How this happened has been documented elsewhere (e.g. http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g), but again as far as MOOCs are concerned, Webheads began focusing on teachers as opposed to students when it started giving EVO (Electronic Village Online, http://evosessions.pbworks.com) sessions in 2002, and the WiA community grew from there, to over a 1000 members today in just the Yahoo Group alone.  Again, this is not meant to be a description of WiA or EVO, but simply to suggest that if WiA and EVO are considered to be courses, and if 1000 members is massive, then they are definitely open and online, and had we started them 6 years after we did we might have called them MOOCs.  At the time we called them variously groups, communities, and networks (Stevens, 2009).

multiMOOC

Meanwhile I have been teaching a Multiliteracies course for EVO and the last couple of years I've been utilizing MOOC elements in the course at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com.  It's essential for such a course to have a framework. When I started the course in 2004 I patterned that framework on Stuart Selber's aspects of functional, critical, and rhetorical multiliteracies.  After attending WorldCALL in 2008 and meeting Mark Pegrum there, I divided the course into the lenses through which he viewed the topic in From Blogs to Bombs.  But as I learned more about MOOCs and experienced them more and more firsthand, in 2011 I started dividing the topics of the available five weeks into those suggested in Dave Cormier's viral videos explaining the 5 steps to Success in a MOOC: orient, declare, network, cluster, and focus (this link will point you to all the videos in the series: http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0).  Now, in 2013, I have renamed the course Multiliteracies-MOOC (or multiMOOC for short) and Ana Cristina Pratas and I are going to run it even more overtly as a MOOC, as described in the proposal and rationale here: http://TinyURL.com/EVO2013MultiMOOC).  

In this course, the syllabus is just a suggestion (orient). Participants decide, each individually, what they want to accomplish in the course (declare). They network with one another to collaborate on shared goals, they produce what I call Me-Portfolios to reflect on how well they have accomplished their goals, and this next time around I hope to introduce some form of badging to help participants focus their goals and vis a vis their accomplishments in the course. In our last Learning2gether event, on Sunday November 11, Jonathan Finkelstein offered to help us envisage and realize that through the LearningTimes BadgeStack facility, http://learning2gether.posterous.com/jonathan-finkelstein-walks-us-through-learnin.

So what is a MOOC course then?

First of all I should point out there there are different kinds of MOOCs, and mine is just one of those kinds.  Lisa Lane has isolated at least three strains in the wild, as shown in this graphic from her blog post here: http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.

In this scheme, multiMOOC would straddle network and task-based. Many people these days would make that distinction in reference to cMOOCs and xMOOCs. The kind of MOOC that I am emulating is a cMOOC, a connectivist one, where the course facilitator lays out a cohesive structure for what is to be learned but, in Siemens's words, does not walk the path for the participants, expecting them to follow <http://youtu.be/VMfipxhT_Co>.  The facilitator instead encourages the participants to find their own pathways through the material.  What George actually says is transcribed in part here:
http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/w/page/48177073/GettingStarted2012evo

"I’m not aware of any research actually that says linear structure produces better outcomes than more chaotic meandering structure. Our intent, based on our theories of learning is to argue that the experience of learning, making sense of that chaos, is actually the heart of the learning experience, but if an instructor makes sense of that chaos for you and gives you all the readings and sets the full path in place for you then to a degree you are eviscerating the learner’s experience because now you’ve made sense of them and all you’ve told them is walk the path that I’ve formed. When it comes to complexity I’m a great fan of letting learner’s hack their way through that path and getting the value of that learning experience and that sense-making process.”

If the facilitator for whatever reason (too many participants, thinks it's better if s/he stands aside) gives the responsibility for sense-making to participants in a MOOC, then they might negotiate how to make sense of their syllabus with one another.  This is where the massive part of MOOC kicks in.  If the critical mass of participants is correct, then nuclear fission will occur in some people's brains, and they will be driven to blog and tag and comment on each other's posts, and leave reflections up as artifacts on the web. If the MOOC is run by Stephen Downes then it aggregates these posts through a script called gRSShopper <http://grsshopper.downes.ca/description.htm> and publishes them each day in a daily 'newsletter' generated from that aggregated content.  If the MOOC is run by me then we have to replace the word 'massive' in its acronym with something more appropriate to the scale of the venture, say, 'minuscule' for example.

In any event, this addresses the first issue of our presentation, the appropriateness of MOOCs to teaching ESOL and other languages.  Also the kind of MOOC best suited to a communicative and socially-driven endeavor such as language-learning is cMOOC, based on the concept as initiated by Siemens and Downes, with Cormier's contribution of the just-so acronym. As for why anyone would want to run such a course, the Internet is full of sites already where language teachers are competing with one another to share their knowledge with students in the most clever way possible, for free. Stephen Downes was once asked why he would flog himself across the back with a course open to thousands (of course, they didn't know at the time it would attract so many :-) when he could have left it at just the two dozen enrolled in the course at the college, and he replied simply, because he would learn from it.  This is the prime motivator for setting up a cMOOC.

xMOOC vs cMOOC

I thought* George Siemens (2012) had coined the term xMOOC when he added a tentative ? to his remarks about "the well-financed MOOCs by Coursera and edX (xMOOCS?)."  While taking pains to explain that feedback on xMOOCs suggested they were effective in achieving  their purposes, he went on to explain: 

Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning. The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing. Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication.

(* However Stephen Downes takes credit for that distinction at 61 minutes into this recording: http://youtu.be/DGaUfWkJdi4)

This brings us to the second brunt of John's post, the second thrust of our presentation, and this is that MOOCs, and by this John means xMOOCs, as conceived by Coursera and Mechanical MOOC, might damage hard-earned university branding.  John and I have both enrolled in such courses.  I have experienced the very humanistic gentle reminders and suggestions issued by Mechanical MOOC, http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4684-mechanical-mooc-offers-introductory-python-.html, almost as if there was a human there, while John can (and will in the presentation) document very different experiences of frustration with Coursera. John's contention is that in their rush to sign on with mechanical courseware generators, universities might be weakening the quality of their offerings until the purveyors of such courses can improve their quality to the standard of instruction expected from those institutions.  Though written to a different topic, Siemens's quotable "there's no there there" springs to mind from the anecdotal evidence that John reports (Siemens's quotable article: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2011/07/30/losing-interest-in-social-media-there-is-no-there-there/).

John's is not a voice in the wilderness. Mike James in an article in I Programmer says that "the methods used by the hugely successful courses are little changed from the dark ages" http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html.  James refers to Sebastian Thun's co-professor in the Stanford AI course, Peter Norvig, who had made reference to the dark ages in his TED Talk on the AI MOOC, http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.

But this article is about what MOOC means to me (to me it means "cMOOC").  However, the extrapolation of the MOOC concept to xMOOC is I think part of what is irritating both John Hibbs and Leigh Blackall.  When Sebastian Thun took the MOOC concept to the point where he demonstrated that he could not only teach Artificial Intelligence in a MOOC, and scale that to thousands of comers, AND assess and evaluate those participants through algorithms developed by Amazon, the proof of concept he had shown was xMOOC.  Thun proved the concept so well that he decided his tenured position at Stanford was beneath him and left there to work for Google and ended up with his own xMOOC, Udacity, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university).  Thun is fully convinced that he made the right move, and he might be recognized as a visionary for it, and like Stephen Downes he will surely learn from the experience, but the motivation for this effort is more toward the flip side of education from that of cMOOC.  Whereas one obvious limitation of cMOOC is that participants need to be highly motivated self-starters who are driven to learn about a particular topic, xMOOC is addressed more at the masses, the hoards of students for whom expensive Ivy League education (or increasingly, even community college education) is less and less an option.  Candace Thille, director of the OLI at Carnegie Mellon University, worries that this development might lead to a "bifurcation" in educational opportunities in the not-that-distant future, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.

Given the downward spiral in the world's economies and shortage of resources, abundance is a word more and more applied to knowledge resources than to natural and manufactured ones, which are approaching scarcity.  Where the ascendancy of knowledge abundance intersects with the increasing lack of natural and economic resources, xMOOCs may well be the most viable path of quality education for learners of the future. John's point has to do with the present state of the quality of THAT instruction, and how that might impact branding of universities associated with the current xMOOC players.

When is a MOOC not a MOOC?

So as not to get off on a semantic battle, technically, a MOOC is a MOOC if it has lots of participants, if it's open to anyone, which means for free (otherwise it wouldn't be open), if it's online, and if it's a course. All of the sites mentioned in this post are MOOCs in that broad definition.

So my conclusion applies to the spirit of MOOC, what I in my heart of hearts feel is MOOC in its pure form.

If I were to conceive of a diagram giving the whole spectrum of MOOC from the 19th century (as Cormier mentions) up through the 20th (with http://study.com and Writing for Webheads) and into the turn of the century (where for example EVO started teaching open courses massively online) - then I would put those early efforts off to the left and place cMOOC as conceived in 2008 squarely in the center, with the current evolution of xMOOCs veering off to the right and into the future.

I would say that open online courses we used to organize and try to scale massively predated a window of opportunity for social networking and aggregation of content that the cMOOCs slotted nicely into.  And I would say that these early efforts depart from what I think of as truly MOOC about as equally as do the later renditions, which though technically massive, open, online, and courses lack a lot of the flavor of the middle-cMOOCs by virtue of not having well developed the connectivist aspects of the 2008 model.

MOOCs in the future: A return to center?

Stephen Downes thinks that MOOCs must evolve in a return to their roots.  He illustrates this for us in a sketch in the Bb Collaborate / Elluminate version of the True History of MOOC (shown in this screen shot from
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-09-26.0742.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350).

The sketch began with MOOCs in the middle and with the entities at the end of each line setting up free open online courses but monetizing some aspect in the form of accreditation, help facilities, etc.  The circle around MOOC indicates that MOOCs utilize OER (open education resources) and the "open web of content" as illustrated in the diagram Stephen inserted and then relegated to the top left corner. Then Steve Hargadon asked in the discussion if these entities (the new xMOOCs) were paying tribute to their roots in cMOOC.  Stephen said off the top of his head, "no" but did note that in something he had come across lately, it was found that the biggest predictor of success at Harvard (apart from getting into Harvard) was participation in study groups.  As others commented, Stephen proceeded to wipe the MOOC from the center of his diagram and put in xMOOC with study groups forming around any given xMOOC.

Stephen then explained, for xMOOC to be truly viable, it will inevitably have to move in the direction of cMOOC.  In his words, “The connectivism model will become the primary model … [xMOOCs] have to grow to become cMOOCS ... They will do that over time." You heard it first there, read it first here :-)

Referenced websites

Blackall, Leigh. (2012). A true(er) history of MOOCs. Open and Networked Learning. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.leighblackall.com/2012/10/a-trueer-history-of-moocs.html.

Downes, Stephen. (2012). A true history of the MOOC. Stephen's Web. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.downes.ca/presentation/300.

Hargadon, Steve. (2012). Tonight - A true history of the MOOC. Education, technology, social media, and you! Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.stevehargadon.com/2012/09/tonight-true-history-of-mooc.html.

Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs Global Education Conference Presentation. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/29/moocs-global-ed-conference-presentation/

Hibbs, John. (2012). MOOCs For Credit – Coursera & Antioch. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/10/30/moocs-for-credit-coursera-antioch/.

Hibbs, John. (2012). Crown Jewels, 21st Century Diploma Mills, MOOCs on the Moon. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/13/crown-jewels-21st-century-diploma-mills/

Hibbs, John. (2012). Global conference Hibbs prepared remarks. Ben Franklin. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://oregonhibbs.com/2012/11/14/global-conference-hibbs-prepared-remarks/#more-682.

James, Mike. (2012). MOOCs Fail Students With Dark Age Methods. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/professional-programmer/i-programmer/4494-massive-open-online-courses-fail-students-with-dark-age-methods.html.

James, Mike. (2012). Peter Norvig On The 100,000-Student Classroom. I Programmer. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/4398-peter-norvig-on-the-100000-student-classroom.html.

Kolowich, Steve. (2012). MOOCs and Machines. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/10/candace-thille-talks-moocs-and-machine-learning.

Lane, Lisa. (2012). Lisa's (Online) Teaching Blog. Retrieved on November 15, 2012 from http://lisahistory.net/wordpress/2012/08/three-kinds-of-moocs/.

Pegrum, Mark. (2009). From Blogs to Bombs: The Future of Digital Technologies in Education. UWA Publishing, Crawley, Western Australia.

Selber, Stuart. (2004). Multiliteracies for a digital age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Siemens, George. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Elearnspace. http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/

Stevens, Vance. (2009). Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks. TESL-EJ, Volume 13, Number 3: http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/past-issues/volume13/ej51/ej51int/.

Stevens, Vance. (forthcoming). Learning2gether: Wiki-based worldwide teacher professional development Paper presented at the annual TESOL Arabia conference in Dubai, March 9, 2012. Submitted for publication in the proceeds. Version available online: http://tinyurl.com/tacon2012L2g.

Tracey, Ryan. (2012). The future of MOOCs. E-learning Provocateur. http://ryan2point0.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/the-future-of-moocs/

MOOCs raise questionable practices

Many questions have been raised in EduMOOC 2011

How big is a MOOC? What is the importance of a cohort in a MOOC? Where is the center? What is its optimal time frame? Can participants dip in and dip out whenever they feel like it?  in which case can they dip in and dip out over a number of years? or can they band together informally in a space that's not called a MOOC? Would that then still be called a MOOC?

Some of these questions are developing answers in the literature. For example, User:Mackiwg created a post in WikiEducator where (s)he asks "How big is a MOOC? Double the number from one week to another". As attrition in MOOCs is also an issue, the answer could just as easily be "halve the number from one week to the next."  Still, for the question of what number constitutes a MOOC, most references point to McAuley, Stewart, Siemens and Cormier (2010) http://davecormier.com/edblog/wp-content/uploads/MOOC_Final.pdf, where for an open online course to be massive, it has to have hundreds or thousands of participants.

McAuley et al. are also relied on for the definition of a MOOC.  For example http://wikieducator.org/OER_university/eduMOOC_planning_group/MOOC_comparison quotes this definition:

• "a MOOC integrates the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources. 
• Perhaps most importantly, however, a MOOC builds on the active engagement of several hundred to several thousand “students” who self-organize their participation according to learning goals, prior knowledge and skills, and common interests.
• Although it may share in some of the conventions of an ordinary course, such as a predefined timeline and weekly topics for consideration, a MOOC generally carries no fees, no prerequisites other than Internet access and interest, no predefined expectations for participation, and no formal accreditation."

However those working on the Wikipedia article are less committed on numbers, saying only that the course must be 'large'; "A Massive open online course (MOOC) is a course where the participants are distributed and course materials also are dispersed across the web. This is possible only if the course is open, and works significantly better if the course is large. The course is not a gathering, but rather a way of connecting distributed instructors and learners across a common topic or field of discourse." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

When is a MOOC not a MOOC?

Size is one thing that MOOCs seem to have in common.  As can be seen, it is often pointed out that this is a necessary characteristic, but I've been experimenting with what I call Miniscule Open Online Courses, which is where I think that the principles on which MOOCs are based apply to courses run on a much smaller scale e.g. http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com. This fits at least the Wikipedia definition of MOOC, where size matters ("works significantly better if the course is large") but is not essential. Some of these characteristics are:

• extremely student centered,
• highly networked,
• course consists of rich content,
• facilitators provide coherent PLE,
• participants navigate curriculum according to their interest and individual choices

Ray Shroeder posted his adherence to much the same principles in the way he and his colleagues conceptualized EduMOOC 2011.  To better display his ideas, I've bulleted his points in the passage quoted here:

"We have approached this MOOC in a way similar to how we teach a graduate seminar.

• We respect the knowledge, diversity and innovative spirit of those who choose to participate in a MOOC. 
• Our approach has been to create opportunities to learn; 
• to mention thought-provoking ideas where we can; 
• to invite some people who care about the topic to our panel discussions, 
• and mostly to point people to interesting resources in the area of online learning. 
• Our approach is not that we, the organizers, will teach in a traditional hands-on way, but that we will provide the opportunity to engage, interact, and learn. 
• We set the original agenda, invited some panelists, created some spaces - though many more spaces were created by the participants - to give some form to the MOOC blob so people would have an idea what it might become." 

(http://edumooc.blogspot.com/2011/07/week-three-turning-to-technology.html)

What's missing?

Mary Rearick, a prolific contributor to EduMOOC 2011, observed in a Facebook post (in the MOOC group on July 15, 2011) in answer to someone trying to find their way in the MOOC, that "one can find oneself going in circles... Since distributed groups have formed and content is scattered everywhere... a person can waste a lot of time and there is really little opportunity to collaborate on anything significant." I replied that "Sometimes I feel I'm going in circles with Google+ but with EduMOOC I'm learning every day. I mentally leap to ePortfolios where individuals can specify their learning goals (significant to them) and document how they achieve them. In this context I wonder if we can consider time wasted if a learning goal is achieved. In a MOOC some of the goals are likely not achievable in other learning environments."

In recent renditions of my multiliteracies course, assessment has been by means of ePortfolios. ePortfolios are a logical accompaniment to MOOCs, and there is in fact an upcoming MOOC being arranged on

that topic, starting later this month: https://sites.google.com/site/eportfoliocommunity/epcop-mooc.

One good example of how connectivist learning takes place is Twitter, where people follow one another in an effort to expand their PLNs and maximize contact with postings leading them to learning even one thing over coffee in the morning.  This one thing (and often it is many things) can be considered a significant learning increase over what was previously available.  Similarly, Mary created another post in the vicinity of the one mentioned above (July 18) http://screencast.com/t/js2O41WX8h. When I saw it, I Scooped it http://bit.ly/r8l3Ou and then tweeted that http://twitter.com/VanceS/status/92852508422180864 thereby spreading the knowledge throughout my network.  The article worthy of so much attention is a study of PLENK 2010, ellucidating patterns of learning to emerge from that recent MOOC: Kop, R. (2011). The Challenges to Connectivist Learning on Open Online Networks: Learning Experiences during a Massive Open Online Course. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning 12, 3. Available: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/882/1689.

I think these ideas are revolutionizing how we (we in this particular choir) are thinking about how we might configure and deliver educational products, but as with most revolutions, the ideas have been there all along. It's just that now the spark is there, or that connectivity is such that learning-directed interaction is now possible on truly massive scales, and the time is right for many of us to realize that the people in the next cubicles (or at least in the ones we've been connecting with online recently) have been mulling these issues in the same way we have for some time now.

For example, the epcop_learnspace MOOC portal at https://sites.google.com/site/epcoplearnspace/home/mooc sports a quote by David Wiley who was asked, "Do I think MOOCs can be effective in supporting learning?" He is quoted here as answering, "Yes, absolutely. The MOOC is not terribly different from the learning I saw occurring in 'Online Self-Organizing Social Systems' a decade ago, which we published an article about in 2002. I thought the possibility for informal learning in these settings was intriguing then. Add the new 'Web 2.0 / social media revolution' that has happened since the article was published into the mix, and it’s downright exciting." (Incidentally the link on the epcop page is broken, but the article is available here: http://www.opencontent.org/docs/ososs.pdf

In our Learning2gether EduMOOCast July 10, 2011 http://learning2gether.posterous.com/vance-stevens-and-jeff-lebow-will-lead-a-disc Nellie Deutsch was hypothesizing on what has given this particular MOOC its legs. She attributes a lot of that to the relaxed degree of control that the moderators here have been exercising, but I would say also that the participants in their present mindset are also more in a position now to take their own control.  There are many experienced MOOCers here, which could not have been possible with the first one just a couple of years ago, when the ground rules were only then being formulated. But that was when this phenomenon was first called a MOOC. 

How long have we been MOOCing about like this?

Jeff Lebow blurred the line further by suggesting in one of his EduMOOCasts that perhaps EVO or Electronic Village Online could be considered a MOOC.  EVO has never represented itself as a MOOC, but it is an ongoing event taking place each January-February since 2001.  It's massive on a scale of hundreds to thousands, it's open, it's online, and it's a set of courses.  It rolls over year after year at http://evosessions.pbworks.com, and it sustains itself year round as its coordinators line up mentors prior to the call for moderators, who then undergo training which is also organized year round, so they can conduct the sessions in January and February. 

Jeff could just as easily have mentioned his own http://worldbridges.net network of webcasting educators. The network of committed and productive educators at http://edtechtalk.com/ continues to churn out podcast after podcast, almost every one including a word of thanks from godfathers Jeff Lebow and Dave Cormier for providing the server and the opportunity.  Many of these podcasters matriculated through http://webcastacademy.net/, a MOOC by all the standards listed in McAuley, Stewart, Siemens and Cormier (2010); i.e. a coherent course with a syllabus and timeframe for training participants in the complex techniques required in webcasting. It's free and open, richly socially networked, and has hundreds of participants who organize themselves around helping to write and update content.

I'm starting to think that communities of practice such as http://webheads.info could conceivably be construed as a MOOC.  This group is also massive on the scales discussed here (over 1000), it is open, online, and is a course insofar as its members are constantly learning from one another, overtly in the case of its weekly online events which have taken place every Sunday since 1998, and have most recently manifested themselves in the seminar series archived at http://learning2gether.posterous.com.

I just happened on a post I made in 2009 when I was following a SCoPE seminar (possibly yet another MOOC) and reflecting on my learning then: http://vancestevens.posterous.com/reflections-on-how-we-learn-through-networks. At the time, networked learning was catching on in a big way (this was just after the first MOOC in 2008, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course) and this post recalls what I was learning at the time and more importantly how I was doing it, and more important still, how I and others in my PLN had been learning from one another from almost the moment ubiquitious connectivity became possible with the advent of Web 2.0.

So, I'm starting to wonder, have we in fact been MOOCing all along?

Reference:

McAuley, A., Stewart, B., Siemens, G., and Cormier.D. (2010). The MOOC model for digital practice. Created through funding received by the University of Prince Edward Island, Social Sciences and Humantities Research Council's "Knowledge synthesis grants on the Digital Economy." Available, http://davecormier.com/edblog/wp-content/uploads/MOOC_Final.pdf.


This post was published on July 14, 2011 and then updated on July 15, and again on July 18

Orienting and declaring in eduMOOC 2011

The concept of MOOC really appeals to me as a way to organize learning.  It apparently appeals to others as well, judging from how so many sign up for them.  When MOOCs are announced, the news spreads across overlapping PLNs like a swarm of locusts and thousands are attracted like moths to a flame.  There's one on now at: https://sites.google.com/site/edumooc/ for 8 weeks starting on June 27, 2011.

I was wondering how to get myself writing about EduMOOC. It was natural that the impetus should come from this thread on the eduMOOC Google Group forum: http://groups.google.com/group/edumooc/browse_thread/thread/6d264a22386f7b99#. 

The thread relates to the optimal amount of time such a course should run and how much time participants should spend with it.

B.D.Boardman asked:

As I find myself checking in with the various discussion threads, 

posts, online articles, and misc content throughout the day I notice
that I'm beginning to "chunk" my MOOC time into small 5-10 minute
segements that perhaps, by the end of the day, may add up to an hour
or more. I am wondering if other participants are having a similar
experience, and what the larger implications are of this approach to
learning. 

In addition, as my attention wanders a little throughout the day, I am
also wondering if 8-weeks is the most appropriate span of time for a
MOOC? Given the content and online dynamic, I wonder if a more
"concentrated" time span (like 2-4 weeks) might be more effective for
this particular learning model? 

So, does anyone have any comments or thoughts on the topic that they
would like to share? 

I've dabbled in MOOCs before and use Dave Cormier's videos in a course I teach on Multiliteracies at http://goodbyegutenberg.pbworks.com/w/page/33070377/Week3EVO2011. I have lately modeled my approach in this course on the MOOC model, only there I call it miniscule open online course, on the assumption that the approach scales downwards nicely.

That course is a part of the TESOL Electronic Village online sessions, http://evosessions.pbworks.com which also run for a similar length of time.  The first round in 2001 was just for 4 weeks, but apparently the coordinators thought that amount of time was not enough because in 2002 they went up to 8 weeks.  In 2003 however, they decided they had overstepped and the time was reduced to 7 weeks. For a while after that we ran them for 6 weeks, but the last couple of sessions have been reduced to 5. The feeling is obviously that when the session goes on for too long, people get worn out toward the end of it.  Eight weeks is intensive for the volunteer moderators, a long time for them to have to sustain momentum.

But in a MOOC it really shouldn't be up to the moderators to have to drive the course for 8 weeks like a 20-mule team.  A course that is set up nicely around provocative aspects of a topic can run itself, especially once you get people interacting.  Dave Cormier for example points out that the over-riding take-away from such a course is not a certificate, as you would expect from a 'formal' learning situation, but the network you develop through participation in such a course. This dovetails nicely into the idea of learning and knowledge being essentially connectivist. As George Siemens told me once, in answer to the last question I asked him at the end of this recording: http://vance_stevens.podomatic.com/entry/eg/2009-01-28T03_19_19-08_00, it is the moderator's job to provide a coherent structure to the course. After that what can you do with 2000+ participants? They learn by constructing their own coherence in their run-up to the end of the course, based on what they are learning and how they are restructuring their knowledge and perceptions of the part of their world they are exploring in the course, and an important part of that is not relying on the moderators to do this restructuring for them.

Nellie Deutsch tweeted a question on the #edumooc tag asking " I wonder if it's necessary to stay to the very end of a MOOC. What will you gain by completing a MOOC?"  I replied "asked another way, what will you gain by starting a MOOC or lurking in one? The answer is 'whatever is gained' :-)" to which Nellie muses: "Maybe there's more learning in quitting before the end. Would it be the same if the MOOC were not free and for credit?"  (an aside to Nellie, see https://twitter.com/bnleez/status/86976985615708160 who posted this also on the #edumooc tag).

This reminds me of a line in one of my favorite Rush songs, "the point of the journey is not to arrive."  http://www.metrolyrics.com/prime-mover-lyrics-rush.html

Anything can happen

From the point of conception, to the moment of truth

At the point of surrender, to the burden of proof

From the point of ignition, to the final drive

The point of the journey is not to arrive

Anything can happen

The double meaning here is either that arriving at the destination is not the reason we travel, or that the point of traveling is to stay on the road and never end the journey.  The question of 'arrival' is what Nellie seems to be getting at.  However B.D. Boardman brings up the amount of time we should spend on the journey, and asks for insights on that question, which is what I am addressing here.

To me it's transcendental.  The point of the journey is to be on it.  It doesn't matter how much time you spend on it or when or where it ends, if it does.  YOU could focus on EduMOOC for 2-4 weeks if that's right for you, or 5 min. a day for whatever duration of time will benefit you.  That's why I said to Nellie that you gain "whatever is gained." Whatever that is, it's quantums over gaining nothing by not participating at all.

As Ken Robinson says in "The Element" (see his TED video at http://blog.ted.com/2009/01/08/sir_ken_robinso_1/), there are 6.93 billion different intelligences on the planet, a number that he would have to revise upward as people are born (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population). Accordingly I would say there are 2000+ approaches to coping with this particular MOOC, and the same number of opinions on how much time would be optimal for it.

I glanced over the reading on Disrupting College suggested for this week, and I'm reading the book by Clayton Christensen et al. on Disrupting Class http://www.claytonchristensen.com/. There, the point is made that the book is researched and written partly to counter the notion that education is often construed as one-size-fits-all (or 'no child gets ahead' as I like to call it). People learn differently, evincing 6.93 billion different intelligences or learning styles, to use Ken Robinson's rough figure (and I was amused by "Clay's" recollection of being involved in distance learning in the mid-70s when distance in the huge auditorium at BYU was anything past the 5th row, where the teacher was reaching the students only asynchronously, e.g. Clay slept while the teacher lectured, and the teacher slept while Clay read the coursebook.)

I'm participating in EduMOOC by blogging around the topic, tweeting, trying out a Scoop.it on the topic at http://www.scoop.it/t/edumooc/, and working whatever and whomever I encounter in this course into my summer workflow.  This post is one salvo among many being inspired by EduMOOC 2011 as we speak, with slim chance of my reading many of those other salvos, or of a significant number reading this one ...unless we consider that one person changed through encountering the opinion of at least one other is a significant number, which it is.

Learning is change; which is to say that if nothing changes, then nothing has been learned.  Ergo, as we learn we change and as we encounter one another in that process of learning we change one another.  The idea of a MOOC I think is to create one cauldron into which you pour a heap of ideas and stir, and change emerges.

Stephen Downes was once asked why he put himself in the position of having to support such a huge endeavor, and he said, because he would learn from it.  What is clear from the premise of Christensen's books for example is that there are many aspects of education that need to change, and what we are doing here is coming to grips with that.

The questions of how long or whether to see the course through to the end are good ones to be asking, but the problem with the answer(s) is that there are 6.93 billion of them.

The suggested reading for Week 1:
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Caldera and Louis Soares Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/02/pdf/disrupting_college.pdf