{"id":5240,"date":"2012-08-18T23:13:42","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T03:13:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=5240"},"modified":"2012-08-18T23:13:42","modified_gmt":"2012-08-19T03:13:42","slug":"universities-and-moocs-and-zombies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=5240","title":{"rendered":"Universities and MOOCs and zombies"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s the last day of MOOCMOOC<\/a>, or Hybrid Pedagogy<\/a>‘s massive open online course about massive open online courses. I was one of 591 registered participants, which made it less massive than the largest lecture classes at universities, yet still larger than any formal class I have ever taken. Several posts from earlier this week were part of that experience. We created, we cried, we kissed some time goodbye. ((Original: “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss three bucks goodbye,” from Hardware Wars<\/a>.))<\/p>\n

At the end, I am no more persuaded that MOOCs are either “a form, a species of their own” or a panacea for higher ed than I was at the beginning of the week. But I have been thinking about MOOCs as a collection of potential experiences, and the term MOOC is probably most usefully thought of as a loosely-defined set of formats, so that even when something called a MOOC isn’t<\/a>, we can talk about possible affordances<\/a>\u00a0without getting into traps of good vs. bad MOOCs<\/a> or\u00a0xMOOCs v. cMOOCs<\/a>. And we can talk about how the technological options are related to the institutional and economic issues involved.<\/p>\n

A discussion Thursday about assessment illustrates the inherent complexity of trying to analyze the category\u00a0MOOC<\/em>. Petra Dierkes-Thrun<\/a> said she was skeptical of one MOOC where the “essay” assignments were 300 words long: “The humanities instructor in me just wants to scream.” I suggested something closer to a fishbowl structure, where the assignment is structured as a low-stakes task with redrafting possible: the first drafts submitted are subject to being displayed with feedback for all participants (and with the writer of the one chosen for public critique having feedback on which to base revision, of course). Repeat that cycle several times in a day, and you have something very different from the Sebastian Thrun Artificial Intelligence class and closer to a studio class or master music class, as Robin Wharton<\/a> observed. But it is also not the more chaotic “connectivist” MOOC in the style of Digital Storytelling<\/a> or the Siemens-Downes Athabaska group<\/a>. It gives up tight control over one common aspect of assessment (comparably-treated evaluation of every single student work) in return for multiplying more targeted feedback.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I spent a few minutes before work writing a sketch of a hypothetical MOOC<\/a>, and again the implied structure is different from other MOOCs. ((I have no idea whether anything like\u00a0Schools and Society and Zombies<\/em> would work as a course, but the sketch and idea is Creative Commons licensed CC-SA, so as long as you acknowledge me, you can steal and run with it.)) It could be offered face-to-face, but the gist also lends itself to letting go of student\/participant work while maintaining a clear focus on the core of the course.<\/p>\n

There are plenty more examples from what other participants sketched out. What we need to get a little further on productive writing about MOOCs is something for online classes (of different sizes) akin to Robert Rotenberg<\/a>‘s discussion of different types of classes in \u00a0The Art and Craft of College Teaching<\/a>\u00a0(2nd edition) (Worldcat entry<\/a>). In that book, Rotenberg makes distinctions between discussion, seminar, and laboratory, and while one can quibble with the specific terms used, his point is that there is a workable fit between the purpose of a class and the format. Want the class to focus tightly around common readings and other materials? That’s discussion, to Rotenberg, but the point is less about Rotenberg’s term than his argument that there is a different feel and organization of a class organized around common materials than a class where everyone brings something to the table to answer a question or solve a problem (what Rotenberg calls a seminar), and yet something different again when the purpose of a class is to induct students into the common practices of a discipline (laboratory, to Rotenberg).\u00a0MOOC<\/em> doesn’t work in that way as a category, and neither does xMOOC<\/em> or cMOOC<\/em>. But since “laboratory” existed as a term for some decades before whatever a MOOC is and before Rotenberg’s functional categories, maybe we can cut the category some slack and just work on the format-purpose connections.<\/p>\n

I am less willing to cut anybody slack on the economic and political context of the current MOOC and distance-learning discourse in the U.S. As Siva Vaidhyanathan observed<\/a> in late June, much of the breathless utopian view of MOOCs is disconnected from faculty work by the discourse’s audience and social networks. When otherwise-sane folks join some governance boards in overpromising the fiscal and educational impact of MOOCs, I have to wonder if the last half-decade’s budget cuts is driving some observers and higher-ed leaders to desperate measures. In terms of the fiscal reality I see, public MOOCs are at best loss-leaders for an institution. There are some creative options for walled MO<\/del>OCS, ((I have crossed out the first O\/open in MOOC to acknowledge that a walled MOOC is merely a MOC.)) and I suspect I am not alone in seeing some ways to use MO<\/del>OCs to address fairly standard college and university needs. But right now, intensive investment in completely public MOOCS are out of the question for the majority of public and tuition-dependent non-profit colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

That inability to participate in or reproduce Coursera or edX will push the vast majority of institutions to make choices about public online courses, some of which will be more strategic than others. This may be a very good thing where an institution develops unique courses with an impact beyond its region: University of Mary Washington will likely never be invited to be part of Coursera, but its identity and reputation will benefit from Digital Storytelling’s existence for a number of years. This niche-building (or -finding) is the fate of non-elite institutions. Individual faculty and staff may generate MOOCs as part of their assignment or on the side, while the big boys (and they\u00a0are<\/em> mostly men) will be figuring out how to make their very public experiments work out for some value of “work out.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s the last day of MOOCMOOC, or Hybrid Pedagogy‘s massive open online course about massive open online courses. I was one of 591 registered participants, which made it less massive than the largest lecture classes at universities, yet still larger than any formal class I have ever taken. Several posts from earlier this week were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,6,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","category-teaching","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-1mw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5240"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5250,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5240\/revisions\/5250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}