Patterns in successful MOOCs

July 2015

As part of the UWA transition to Blackboard, speakers have been invited in to discuss the lessons they have learnt in building successful blended learning environments.

1. Lionel Skinner – Associate Lecturer Curtin Business School explained the features of the Fundamentals of Business Unit he presents to 1500 students a semester.

Lionel set out three main stages –

• Pre-workshop through which students are introduced to key concepts through pods that link out to online activities and content.  This links  to in video quizzes that must be answered before students move on and that seek to identify prior knowledge.
• Workshop stage – in which students are grouped together around engaging activities and case studies.
• Post workshop stage – personal reflection an linking of theoretical ideas and practice. 

This is reflected in a Model that begins with 
Connect – the unit coordinator introduces the topic/concept and set up opportunities to engage learners through the commencement of the inquiry process. 
Active Research – Investigating, analysing and processing information to construct new understanding. This is where opportunities to scaffold learning to enable (active learning) students to conceptualise their understanding of a concept. 
Action – Sharing and evaluation of outputs, with peer feedback and reflection on assessment.

 

2. Professor Mark Grimley of Swinburne University talked about their experience in building a massive online autism spectrum unit.
This unit on autism, was not targeted at academic staff/students but  anyone with an interest in the topic area. Design of the MOOC at first was based on the transmission model of teaching – with the usual assumption that the MOOC site needed to content dump all of the information required.  Other criticism was that e.tivities were one dimensional and assessment too traditional. 

The new model sought to first introduce – or signpost – the concepts and ideas but controlled introduction to these.  This then led to the expectation to participate in a number of asynchronous activities over the 12 week period.  Participants helped each other to answer and understand a range of issues on their topic relating to further information links as required.   This allowed users to investigate and share resources that addressed these issues and shifted the requirement to students themselves to produce content and make links with their own personal experience or work place contexts.

He discussed how John Birdman relates the flipped model to flipping Blooms remembering and understanding levels to online and higher order thinking towards interactive activities.

The important lessons learnt in these models is to firstly:

• Firstly introducing participants to concepts and ideas and gaining curiosity and interest is very important. 
• This then triggers further interest into further reading and investigation of the available content
• Resist the temptation or urge to feel you have to introduce students to everything they will need to know about a topic (allow them to do some exploration)
• Teachers role should be more about chunking and introducing students to the journey. 
• Activities (especially inquiry based) drive the further in-depth use of resources and the application of the concepts and ideas within them. 
• Activities developed throughout need to be seen as tangible and relevant to learning, and be of practical use (Feed forward activities leading towards assessment)