Open learning, sharing and openness

The second subject area that we were asked to reflect on in the ONL252 course is open learning, sharing and openness. (Looked for a cc licensed picture on the internet for information transfer and illustrates my post with the one picture I found on Openclipart: Picture: openclipart.org/192884 by Merlin2525. I hope this picture can signal better understanding between people.)

Since it has been up for discussion that I should develop a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) based on wishes from the industry, I was interested to find out more about how learning takes place and is evaluated in a MOOC, and why these courses are created (as they are). What does the literature say about MOOCs? This reflection will be a summary of what I, as a newcomer to the field, have learned after a first quick literature search about MOOCs and my thoughts about it.

The word MOOC was coined in 2008 and the field grew in the late 2000s and early 2010s (Baturay, 2015). When I did a quick search with the word MOOC in Google scholar, the first articles that came up for me are from this time period.

Common teaching methods in MOOCs are (Baturay, 2015):

-(Short) Filmed lectures

-To the students given open access literature

-Quiz

-Discussion forum

-Live sessions with course leaders

These forms of teaching require limited course leader time per student, which is important in a MOOC that must be designed to be able to handle many students (Jansen and Schuwer, 2015). The first three I don’t see require any time at all, once the material has been produced, except that it may be necessary to review that the material is still available when there are updates/changes to the technical systems involved. The last two teaching activities require more course leader time. Discussion forums may need to be reviewed by a facilitator to prevent inappropriate content. I reflect on the fact that the time for this can possibly be reduced or removed with appropriate technology. I think such technology is used for social platforms, but I am unsure how this is done and how well the systems work. Anyone who knows, or has knowledge of this?

Quizzes and discussion forums can, in addition to acting as learning, be used for examination in the course. For example, in order to pass the course, students may be required to post in discussion forums and comment on other student’s posts (Baturay, 2015). A reflection is that in the ONL252 course we are examined in this latter way.

Many MOOCs have low throughput rates (lower than/about 10% (Sannicandro et al 2019)), which is perhaps not so strange as they are openly available so that many people can click on them and see if they are interesting for them. One of the reasons given for the low throughput is however that there is not as much personal engagement when interactivity with others is low (Wang et al, 2018; Loh et al, 2024). The use of discussion forums, as mentioned among the common teaching methods above, is a way to increase social interaction, which has been seen to have positive effects along with nudging messages around participation (Loh et al, 2024). Other ways to increase interactivity that have been studied and shown to have positive effects are the use of learning groups and one-to-one interaction with fellow students (Loh et al, 2024). There are also research studies that say that high interactivity in a MOOC can take energy away from learning (Wang et al, 2018), but overall the focus seems to be on achieving increased interactivity. I reflect on the fact that we use learning groups in the ONL252 course together with recorded LIVE sessions with teachers.

In Europe and the US, part of the purposes of the MOOCs have been marketing, to obtain funding opportunities, income generation, to improve pedagogy or cost reduction (Jansen and Schuwer, 2015). When it comes to research on MOOCs, opinions have been expressed after the MOOCs’ start-up period that research should change from studies of engagement to studies of real learning. A lot of focus has been on throughput and just because you have completed the course or passed a quantitative test, for example, it does not mean that  you have increased your conceptual understanding or expert thinking in the field (Reich, 2015).

Examples of what has been studied in research studies include randomly assigning students to two different versions of a MOOC course in order to study the difference in outcomes from the two versions, similarly studying the outcome of randomly giving different virtual rewards for participation in discussion forums, etc (Reich, 2015). Baked in experiments for research purposes have mostly been used to study learning arrangements in general, but also to some extent to study learning in specific subject areas. I reflect on the fact that research is being done on the ONL252 course.

We are in fact all part of a large teaching experiment!

References:

Baturay M.H. (2015), An Overview of the World of MOOCs, Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, 427-433, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.01.685.

Jansen, D. and Schuwer, R. (2015). Institutional MOOC strategies in Europe. Status report based on a mapping survey conducted in October – December 2014. EADTU report.

Loh, H.S., van Jaarsveld, G.M., Mesutoglu, C. and Baars, M. (2024) Supporting social interactions to improve MOOC participants’ learning outcomes: A literature. Education Reimagined: The Impact of Advanced Technologies on Learning, https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/305849

Reich J. (2015) Rebooting MOOC Research, Science,  347, 34-35. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1261627

Sannicandro K., De Santis A., Bellini C., Minerva T. (2019) Analysis of completion and dropout rates in EduOpen MOOCs, Giornale Italiano Della Ricerca Educativa. Special issue, 27-42. https://iris.unimore.it/handle/11380/1184619

Wang, W., Guo, L., He, L., & Wu, Y. J. (2018). Effects of social-interactive engagement on the dropout ratio in online learning: insights from MOOC. Behaviour & Information Technology, 38(6), 621–636. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2018.1549595