There’s a very cleverly-constructed MOOC about MOOCs this week, MOOC MOOC, and while my days are going to be crazy this week workwise, I’m trying to dip in as much as I can to get a handle on the chaotic discussion. At the end of the second day Athabaska University MOOC organizer/connectivist George Siemens wrote,
pattern in every mooc: intro, chaos, self-organization, sharing images/artifacts, sub-networks, frustration, dropout, core left #moocmooc
Siemens’s “in every mooc” frame is very different from the split others are writing about, between cMOOCs (which come from the Siemens-Downes–Groom “connectivist”/chaotic perspective) and xMOOCs (the big ones of Coursera, Udacity, etc., often organized explicitly around a technical/broadcast model). Siemens is not writing about the fundamental orientation of any individual MOOC (I suspect he’d at least be sympathetic to Marc Bousquet’s division of good and bad MOOCs) but rather the responses to the affordances of anything like a MOOC.
Affordance is an engineering-design term referring roughly to what a particular technology allows in terms of human action. In terms of a MOOC, Siemens observes how participants go off in different directions (not being choreographed by a teacher in the room), try to figure things out in subsets of the class, use social media in or out of an LMS to share media, leave, etc. All of these activities are made possible by certain technical features of online courses large enough to be called a MOOC. Those are not the only participant responses possible, but I am not surprised that there’s a certain subset of potential actions that become modal actions.
As people talk about either the revolutionary potential of MOOCS or the potential traps of same, maybe we should put the actions of real people into a useful context that addresses both the technology involved and the social structures. After all, with a few hundred thousand participants in MOOCs in the past year, that’s a lot of people introducing themselves, being chaotic, self-organizing, sharing media, connecting with some other participants, (attempting to complete (or completing) assignments, and dropping out. As Virginia Commonwealth University’s Jon Becker points out, ed tech discussions all too rarely frame issues in terms of affordances. And yet if there are modal actions in MOOCs, we need to talk about affordances in the context of the bigger debates over higher education. ((Other bit of required reading here: Melvin Kranzberg’s 1986 essay on the social construction of technology.))
Attractive affordances, from my experience at this meta-MOOC:
- Wandering
- Inviting
- Following
- Expressing/broadcasting
- Responding briefly
- Leaving
Harder stuff to do (again from my very brief experience):
- Guiding
- Collective close readings
- Engaging in intense, bounded discussion
I know that in the mega-MOOCs with software assessments (Coursera et al.), there is guiding in an algorithmic sense, but not necessarily in a cognitive sense. There are plenty of courses where the goals are perfectly consonant with unguided, distant, radiating experiences. The Digital Storytelling 106 MOOC is a great example of that. Or the model of MOOC/iTunes as a university extension video course where some people make their own experiences.
On the other hand, if the affordances of MOOCs make more closely-guided instruction impossible, then we should be open about those limitations. There are great courses that are great precisely because of the intensity of a common experience (or the commonality of an intense experience). There may be people who cannot learn in any way that is closely guided or in some intense common manner, but in the same way that I will not deny the inherent value of an experience like DS106, it is foolish to deny the value of more closely guided structured experiences.
And now, for my fellow participants in the MOOC MOOC, ((And if you are not “officially” a participant, you are in a distant way if you comment!)) what do you think?
I was intrigued by the statement of modal actions, too, though I didn’t know to call it that until I read your post. Group behaviors interest me (though not in a professional way), because they help orient the experience I am having. This is the first MOOC I have participated in. Do you think that closely guided, structured experiences are impossible in MOOC? That seems likely, to my mind. I find small learning group experiences to be the most transformative. I like the tasting menu one gets with this type of sprawling input, but I’m not giving up slow, close reading and deep listening as pedagogical strategies.
The rich possibilities of modern instructional technology should not cause us to forget the ways in which new instrumentalities are producing reality and shaping experience of the real. There is, after all, an interpretive foundation of MOOC-praxis that needs to be addressed by a philosophy of technology. The more quickly we develop this kind of hermeneutic, the less apt we are to find ourselves at a dead end; and the better we are able to make explicit those interpretive shifts in the past as well as those that lie ahead.