Our manuscript deadline for this book is approaching (2 months, really?) and the challenge of pulling together the threads of the impact of MOOCs is ramping up. How do we disentangle the differences between the impact of MOOCs and the impact of online learning or budget cuts? What relationship does the MOOC have to the OER movement? lots and lots of questions, and all we can do is keep writing I’m working on an article around the end of the topic with Valerie Irvine right now… proof that i’m thinking about it Val

MOOC as an act of curation
I was looking over the work the folks at the university of Edinburgh on Coursera, specifically the E-learning and Digital Cultures and the tidyness of the work that they had done really struck me. Each week, here’s five neatly organized videos, here’s some nice things to read, here are some more complex things you might want to engage with… all nicely arranged by topic. Or, you could say, by chapter.

Having mostly piggy backed on the encyclopedic knowledge of Downes and Siemens for the teaching of MOOCs, it’d never really struck me how much the process is really about carving out a piece of the internet. A dabble of this perspective, some papers by that person, lets get some differing opinions in here – I remember this really great video by…

If you’re lucky (and I would argue, if you’re doing it right) that curation does predate the course, but it only ramps up when the course starts. Grsshopper, Stephen’s software for newsletters, is a curation engine. It pulls together All the Things created by the participants in a course so they can be seen by anyone who wants to. Again, chopping the internet into manageable pieces.

The Edinburgh example
According to the Times Higher article from yesterday, The University of Edinburgh got 300,000 students for its Coursera courses. The article magically sets out what I have always thought was the most likely business model for MOOCs – the loss leader. In 220 words they lay out their reasoning… they currently have 2000 online students. They want to have 10000 students. One can imagine that they hope that of the 300K 8000 students not currently registered for ‘for pay’ courses at the institution will decide to pay money to have a longer relationship with their institution.

Quality of instruction/personality
This really puts the pressure on the instructors in the MOOC to represent the institution in a positive way. In order for the loss leader approach to work, the Coursera experience needs to be a positive one. I also don’t think it’s a big leap to believe that the people who are teaching the Coursera courses will also be the people teaching the ‘for pay’ courses that the institution will be hoping that students take in the future. Personal faculty brand continues to increase in importance.

Open content
Every bit of the content that i saw in the course mentioned above was open access. Due to the crazy international laws around copyright, trying to get a contract with a publisher for access to a journal for 300,000 people. At least… not under any current model. So we have maybe 100 items of open content being curated by the instructors and then seen by potentially thousands of other teachers. Important point.

The threat to journals
I see this creating a two point threat to the journal infrastructure as we know it. Current journals are either of the open access variety, where mostly unpaid academic type people take care of the work and allow every to access the material. These, i presume, will get more and more traffic due to MOOCs. The paid journals, where libraries are charged fees based on the number of times people have accessed a particular piece or based on an institutional price governed by the number of students or… well… there are a few models. Anyway these journals are not usable by MOOCs. The licensing as it is would be too weird.

Broad viewing of open access
I’ve always thought that one of the reasons that OER and open access has struggle to catch on in some circles is that many academics had particular articles and people that they were accustomed to using in their courses, and choosing to go open access would require rethinking their courses and long search times. The curation process that is a MOOC alleviates this to a great degree. Here we have a network textbook that, in our present case the fine folks at Edinburgh, have taken the effort to collect. How easy to just take it and repurpose the pieces that you need.

The brand element
The need to publish is wrapped into a pile of tangles inside the academic system, tenure promotion, institutions proving that they have impact, satisfying funders etc… If we are having giant courses with 100K people in them, however, and anyone who publishes in a closed journal is left out, that’s going to have an impact on the uh… impact. The chance to have your work viewed, your institution to be known as having influential people in it, could increasingly be a matter of whether your material is used in a MOOC.

And, as mentioned earlier, your ability to market online courses could increasingly be a question of whether you have the kind of faculty that people want to take a course with. If i’m looking to learn something about connectivism, and I see George’s name on half the things that are written about them, I’m going to be tempted to take the connectivism course with george at Athabasca. If he’d published all those things in closed journals, it seems less likely that they would get found

So whither the closed journal? They are either going to get left out of the MOOC drive, or they are going to have to change the licensing. If they are going to charge anything for the material, however, that will be taking the price of the course from ‘free’ to ‘not-free’… which is a pretty big leap no matter how much you charge. The open net, on the other hand, is licensed in a way that is perfectly setup for MOOCs. Now that we have so much public curation going on, we are not only going to be able to find more of the existing awesomeness, I’m guessing that we’ll see people releasing more and more of their stuff for free… if only so they don’t miss out.

#moocmooc RE @davecormier What is a MOOC vid: Is there room for the instructor(s) to provide the trunk of course & Students fill in branches

— Dan Lemay (@danlemayPI) January 6, 2013

I got an interesting question on twitter today from someone asking about the decentralized role of the teacher in a ‘What is a MOOC video’ that we recorded as part of a research project on MOOCs Sandy Macauley, Bonnie, George and I did in 2010. (video embedded at the end of the post) and i think Dan’s question gets to the heart of one of the important possibilities presented by the internet which have been taken up in MOOCs in one way or another.

Instructor as trunk
It should be obvious, i guess, that the trunk is essential to the tree. You can get away with cutting a few branches, or maybe a root or two, but once you do away with the big part at the middle of the tree you are now talking about something that is ‘wood’ not ‘a tree’. The image of instructor as trunk, then, is not only a question of them being ‘in the middle’ of the class, but they are also the critical and only point of connection between each of the branches. The trunk is the only reason the branches have for being. The conversation between the different branches (students) is structured and routed directly through the instructor.

For many years our education inevitably had to work this way. Students journeyed for miles to get to the location where the knowledge was, whether that was a few scant books or the instructors who are read or even written them. Each of those students needed to interact with that instructor in order to gain access to whatever it was they were going to say. Each of those students often had to share access to the same books… The instructor, ostensibly, would have acquired other knowledge, somewhere else, that it wasn’t feasible to transport to the location of the students. The instructor was the trunk around whom the students worked.

This provided a ton of advantages, many of which we now simply see as ‘what education is’. The technologies (and i mean the word very broadly) that were available had a profound impact not only on what was possible but also on choices that were made based on the particular advantages of that system. This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list, but lets take a look at what the advantages of a trunk based education system are

1. everyone is, more or less, accessing the same content
2. People are, more or less, accessing content at the same time

This may seem to be fairly straightforward, but they have far reaching consequences. If everyone is accessing the same content (because its all coming from the same instructor), we can measure the degrees to which people have accessed that content. If they are accessing it at the same time (because that instructor is one person, and can only be in one place at one time, and it’s more efficient to have all the people in, say, a room to listen to him/her) then we might as well have everyone get together and do the learning at the same time.

If we’re all going to learn together at the same time, and we’re all going to learn the same things, then we might as well package that in such a way that we can call it something. Say english 101. The trunk pulls things together, it allows for things to be standardized, measured and kept on time. These are often useful things. One primary problem, and this is the response that i made to Dan’s tweet earlier today…

@danlemaypi If you do, to follow your analogy, when the trunk is removed after the course, the connections die

— dave cormier (@davecormier) January 6, 2013

Bring on the network
If the internet were to happen to education, now, things could be a bit different. Two of the things that are swept off the board, potentially, are the need to access the same content and to access it at the same time. If we can all access content out there on the internet and we can do it whenever we want, then we can go ahead and just learn the things that we want whenever we want to. Many of us have stories of learning how to do things, about new things or new ways of seeing things on our own time in our own way using resources (and people) on the web. There are now very few things you can’t learn on the web… in one way or another… if you accept that all those people out there on the web are people you can learn from.

But the wealth of possibilities brings on its own challenges. Along with the new connectivity, we were not given more time. We were also not given simpler lives that would allow for the inclusion of many new areas of research, both in our private and our professional lives. There is also the problem of sifting through the content available… how am I supposed to evaluate the worth of something I don’t understand.

Join a community
This has been a solution for many of the early adopters to the new connective technologies. Communities allow for collaborative evaluation of content and the ‘hive mind’ approach to knowing. You yourself may not have access to the things that you need, but someone nearby might. If you can bring together enough people from a field, you have a chance of being able to tackle most any problem.

But those communities have challenges of their own. They are difficult to join… and difficult to lurk in. They tend to develop their own habits, their own jokes, and while many communities mean to allow newcomers to join it can be difficult and off putting to find ways of fitting in with groups that are already cohesive.

Where’s my teacher?
And so we go and find ourselves a teacher again. But the teacher, this time, need not come along with all the content for their course crammed up in their head, or trapped in a sheaf of papers. That teacher has access to all kinds of content on the internet, has some sense of where much of it is stored, and has the ability (one hopes) to help evaluate the worth of that content.

The second C in cMOOC
I am a firm believer in the inclusion of the idea of a course into Massive open and online learning. I have spent many years working with communities online, with many failures some victories. It’s hard work bringing people together online, and harder work keeping them together. Having people study at the same time offers the ‘eventedness’ that spurs people to focus on a particular subject, idea of concept in ways that they often don’t when left to their own devices. It’s like going to the gym with other people… the proximity, the sharing, the shame are all part of the thing that keeps you going.

Keeping the Open in MOOC
So I’m willing to keep the we do this at the same time part that we learned from pre-web learning, but I don’t feel the same way about content. There are few fields where anything but the first few basic concepts aren’t subject to negotiation. There are many sides to be taken, contexts in which to take them and different applications that requires different kinds of input. If we allow people to choose their own content (within reason) we allow for those things to form on their own.

It’ll make grading harder (assuming you think that’s necessary)
It’ll make organizing it harder

But when you take the trunk out of education, when you remove the instructor as the person who makes decisions about the content, you might allow for the connections that are made during the course to remain when the course is finished. Authentic connections (assuming there’s such a thing) to content and people that don’t require the teacher to keep them growing.

A comment by Jason Green on twitter got me thinking again about a different lens through which to see the MOOC. The book, and particularly the textbook, are at the core of many of our classrooms. There’s no denying that having the content for a course all tied up in a handy, portable, near unbreakable format is convenient. Proof of this can be found in the fact that the yearly slaying of trees, organizing of content, printing and ordering of books and queuing in the bookstore to purchase them are almost as strong today as it was 30 years ago. Surely some people (I’m looking at you Cable Green) have encouraged a move towards taking those books online, but many of those models replicate much of the ‘prepare, organize and buy’ models of the paper book industry while saving trees and avoiding fleecing the student. Those books are still, however, finite and finished.

The book
The physical book and the logistical and practical constraints that it imposes on knowledge and learning are key to understanding the shift that the internet imposes on education. Among other things the book

1. Imposes a need to ‘finalize’ a version of knowledge
2. Requires that the content of a course be decided before the students arrive
3. Is not easily added to – it does not allow contribution by the learner
4. cannot argue back

If I was to accuse the book of one crime, it would be that it tends to encourage passivity. As it cannot change, it does not encourage change in others.

The textbook has a set of implicit literacies that go along with it. It encourages linearity. It is a single source. Many of them speak as a single point of authority.

The Feedbook
The Feedbook is an idea that I’ve been toying about for years, and, in some ways is the idea that got ‘Dave’s Educational Blog’ started. In 2005 I started talking about the idea of a feedbook, that is, looking at a textbook as a collection of feeds from various people in the field that you are in, and creating a ‘living textbook’. It would replace the static textbook and allow students to not only access content and ideas that are incredibly current, they would also have that content contextualized by the identity of the person who had written…

There were any number of challenges to doing it this way. It ignored, first of all, many forms of knowing and representing knowing (like formally written articles) which are of great value. Logistically it also forces any number of problems in terms of pulling together OPML files, choosing people who were blogging ‘well’, and keeping things from getting distracted. It’s also pretty much impossible for someone who does not already have a number of connections in the network to be able to get ‘in’.

Distributed participation
Many of the criticisms that I’ve heard about the cMOOCs that we’ve done and I think much of the potential that people have missed in the xMOOCs is through a misunderstanding of the distributed possibilities presented by the model. If you think of a course as given by an expert for the sole intent of someday having that expert tell you that you have reached a number of pre-agreed objectives, then we are not using the word course in the same way.

I see a course as a way of organizing a discussion, whether that be simply through the organization of topics or questions or with the suggestions of other people’s recorded (in text, video or otherwise) thoughts to provide common ground for discussion. I see a course as hosting a themed party. With the MOOC it’s more like earth day. On this day you all go about doing things that, for you, represent your hopes and dreams for how we can better take care of the planet. There are suggested activities (like going dark in your house for an hour) and there are suggested ways to change your activities to make things healthier for the planet, but, at the end of the day, your participation is up to you. Earth day is a reminder that this issue is important to you. It brings focus.

MOOC as textbook
More and more I see any MOOC as an event. It’s an event in which you can participate in whatever way you like. The social (and financial) contract explicitly at the core of most courses doesn’t exist. While this may lead to some of the low rates of completion that are part of what a MOOC is, they allow for flexibility of participation. The MOOC as ‘textbook’ is one of those methods of participation.

We have heard many stories of people taking a credit course ‘through the MOOC’(John Schinker’s story of trying it on his own is interesting for this). There are a number of courses that have run alongside of the MOOCs with support staff and small tight knit communities taking what they were interested in from the MOOCs and leaving the rest. The MOOC event structure often includes suggested content and activities and also has the advantage of shaping a broad discussion along certain lines that you can use to structure your own course. It can be any course’s main content… even if the instructor spends much of their time disagreeing with the content.

The big advantage, i think, to conceptualizing the MOOC as a textbook is that it is embedded in networked literacies. In a paper textbook the creation and negotiation of the content is almost entirely hidden. There is no way to contribute to the discussion on the content that is being covered. Multiple voices are at the core of a distributed view of content. You could easily have three posts in a given day all taking exactly opposite opinions from each other leaving your students to have to choose what works for them.

What problem does it solve?
For one, it provides a means of access to a community. Through a MOOC anyone with internet access can work towards being part of a discussion. I see that as a good thing.

It also offers choice. Indeed it forces choice. Choosing and choosing well has always been a valuable literacy, but in the context of a world of knowledge abundance, choice is slowly become the most important literacy.

In the end, and this is my bias showing, the community becomes the curriculum.

NOTE: stevendkrause.com/2012/10/11/whats-good-about-moocs-or-they-arent-about-selling-textbooks-they-are-textbooks/ here are some similar ideas blogged by Steven Krause a few weeks before this post.

It’s the job that’s never started that takes the longest to finish
- Gaffer Gamgee

We are writing a book about MOOCs. And, more specifically, I think we are interested in asking the question “what do MOOCs say about higher ed”. And this is my first blog post about it.

It’s been four years since we first began to talk about Massive Open Online Courses as if they were a thing that existed. At that time we were seeing possibilities in the internet to do things, from an education perspective, that we hadn’t predicted and didn’t entirely understand. It seemed that if you tried to open access to the learning process as far as you could, and then still treated things as if they were ‘a course’ lots and lots of people would come out to learn.

Dozens of MOOCs have followed, big and small, and the word now has a much larger scope of meaning than it did a short four years ago. It no longer necessarily includes the original openness of content implicit in the request for engagement from all participants. It is now also something that includes mass testing far outside of what was originally envisioned as an event that celebrated the freedom and responsibility of the participant. The word massive has also undergone a scale change. We’ve gone from 2300 in that first MOOC, to the big college MOOCs in the US which are creeping closer to half a million.

• Why have they been so successful at attracting participants?
• Why have they generated such media enthusiasm?
• Why are random people in Charlottetown who have no idea that I’ve been involved in them asking me about ‘online learning MOOCs’
• Was there a gap in offerings from those institutions that the MOOC fills?
• Did we have any sense that this gap existed?
• Does a MOOC have any place in what we understand higher education to be?
• Does it change that meaning?
• Will the brand power required to run a MOOC and attract people make a permanent separation between different kinds of institutions and different kinds of experts?
• What is the purpose of higher education, and how does the MOOC help us have that discussion?
• Are the xMOOCs and the cMOOCs really all that different?

I have many questions that I’d like to explore in the next 7 months of writing. This is a small scattering of them really. I do think, however, that the path that they’ve taken, particularly in the last year or so, offers a window into Higher Ed that can tell us a great deal about where we are as an industry, both from our own perspective and from the perspectives of our varied clients.

And that’s one of the funny things about Higher Education. I’ve spent the last five years or so working in the communications department of a university as well as doing educational research. It has left me with a fair amount of experience about how complicated and many faceted the field really is.

How MOOCs might challenge the idea of Faculty
The freedom that tenure gives many faculty, and the proxy freedom shared by those without tenure, mean that in many cases they are able to deal with other clients (say, students) in most whatever manner they please. It is not the ‘job’ of the faculty to ‘please’ students. Many would say it certainly should not be. This, however, contradicts the needs of many institutions to attract more students to help offset the funding that is no longer coming from governments in some jurisdictions. Do they need to be famous/popular to attract large numbers of online students? Do they attract students outside of their university brand?

I would like to think that faculty are more than just ‘student attractors’ and that we need not think about them in the neo-liberal terms i just positioned them in… but what is are they exactly? Are they leaders? Mentors? Robots standing in for machines that can deliver content? This is a critical question that the MOOC pulls into focus.

In a MOOC world, if we think of the MOOC as a monolith, we have left any ratio of faculty vs. students in the dust. Once you get into the realm of there being 100000:1 we might as well leave that aside. I have claimed in other venues that we need not see the MOOC as a single course, but that it could easily be seen as a rallying point for many courses on the same subject. Those subsidiary courses could easily be courses with a more familiar 25:1 ratio.

But what is the faculty role in that ratio? If we believe that testing can ‘check’(think of the Pearson testing centres) or even ‘guide’(with analytics informed just in time responsiveness) learning, and the content is free and available for everyone, than it must be something more than either of those.

I’d like to think that there is a scope for learning behind and above content that can be repeated and defined. I would like to believe that one of the reasons that universities are important is that people get access to experts who can share the reality of knowing more than just the trappings of memory. This kind of argument, however, forces us to dig deeper into the what learning is, and what we are trying to do with it.

This is the kind of conversation that I’m hoping to have through this book… to take up interesting questions and run them through the lens of the MOOCs to see what comes out.

I hope you feel like coming along with us.