MOOC interactions for knowledge construction

One of the problems with MOOC learning, as I see it, is that it is often difficult to reliably 'connect' with 'people like me', or perhaps 'people not like me' if you are looking for a new viewpoint.

Where I think MOOCs have potential, is one of an attraction space, where people who are attracted to some content or field of study can come together and openly share their experiences and help each other overcome issues they may be facing.

So my idealised scenario is what I would call the (massive online) cocktail party: Say I'm a programmer and I've got a problem at work because I can't seem to work out how to achieve a certain outcome. I happen to meet someone at a cocktail party, and get talking about my problem. This person I meet is actually an environmental chemist who has never thought of my exact problem, but has encountered something which he thinks is similar, perhaps an algorithm which describes the movement of neutrons or something. Upon hearing how a chemist would approach my problem I suddenly realise that this is the solution I have been looking for all along.

How can a MOOC start to engender those types of conversations?

The example I give above is one of serendipity. In a very closely related parallel world, I would have been standing next to someone else who cannot unlock my problem. This is life. But can a MOOC ever be designed to increase the possibility of these type of eureka moments? I think it can.

Problems for this idealised scenario in MOOCs as they stand:

1. Interaction is (nearly) always randomised. Some platforms do this better than others, but there is no 'neat' way of just finding someone who I think is like me, or someone who is not like me but using the same words to describe themselves (perhaps a TEFL teacher from Turkey and one from Saudi Arabia).
2. MOOC learners are content focused. I think this may change over time, but right now, MOOCs replicate a certain behaviourist pedagogy and do not provide many tools for creating new knowledge - it is more about consuming what the tutor said, or forums for asking your peers whether they can help you understand what the tutor said/ what the concept at hand is.
3. Tools for assessment of learning are behaviourist focused in the main. We can discuss how far up the Bloom's taxonomy an MCQ can take you (perhaps even as far as evaluation), but it is nearly always for checking understanding of indisputable content. What about disputable content or open questions?

Scale of MOOCs - what is Massive?

I mentioned in my previous post that one of the first questions I'd like to explore is what it means to be massive, and what impact having a massive number of learners participate in a learning experience.

100K certainly is massive for the AI Stanford course, in terms of joiners. Even 10K in terms of 'full participants' is large by comparison to the typical undergraduate classroom of 500 (max). The typical classroom might have a teacher to student ratio of 1:25, or 1:50, so the degree to which each learner is receiving a personalised experience is pretty high, compared with 1:100K or 1:10K as seen in the Stanford MOOC. Do the undergraduates learn more? What does it mean to learn more anyway?

Norvig said that in writing an answer to a question on the discussion forum, he didn't complete writing it until someone else had answered for him. Another student. Can students really teach each other in this way? I guess when you have 100K people all enrolled in the same class, you are certainly going to find a higher level of diversity (prior experience, expertise) than your typical 100-500 undergraduate class.

So a good question here is "how can peers teach each other in a constructive, self-correcting manner?"

Back to the question of massive, 100K seems massive in terms of watching Peter Norvig's videos on AI, but even this pales in comparison to the nearly 2.5 BILLION (I actually cannot believe this now I've actually looked it up), who have watched the performer PSY perform "Gangnam Style".

But that's just mindless entertainment, right? Where is the peer supported collaborative learning in Gangnam Style? Well, there are over 4.5 million comments on his page. To what degree can we call anything there peer supported collaborative learning? I don't have time to read through it to find out, let's be honest, none of us do, but it is worth postulating right now that amongst those comments, there is probably something that constitutes learning, or knowledge construction, even in a traditional sense.

Where I am going with all this? After watching the video (almost) to the end, I'm not sure myself, except to say that economies of scale do not necessarily equate to successful learning outcomes.

Learning is more than this. So there needs to be more to a MOOC than a massive number of people aggregating around pieces of content. And for this we need to look at what constitutes learning, and how people can work with each other to construct meaningful interactions which develop and construct new knowledge and praxis.

Begin the begin

We must all begin somewhere and this is where i begin my research project, examining the nature and construction of knowledge in MOOCs.

MOOCs are Massive Open Online Courses. They have sprung up in the media since around 2011 when traditional online learning type tools were 'transformed' (ironic italics) into something big. No, something MASSIVE (ironic caps). 100, 000 learners enrolled on a Stanford MOOC in Artificial Intelligence. Around 10% of these people completed the course, watched the videos, did the tests etc., although no credit was granted. This was just for fun, right?

Something extraordinary was happening here, or so it was claimed. Even 10% of 100, 000 is more than Peter Norvig had probably taught in 10 years, and all in one go. Wasn't this going to change the way we think about learning, and access to higher education?

I guess the answer to this question is kind of where I began: What do we mean by learning? I previously italicised the idea that traditional online learning tools were transforming educational experience, but no new tools or innovation were added to what was already there. Virtual Learning Environments have been a mainstay of more traditional higher education for well over a decade up to 2011, with all the possibilities of self-marked tests, video lectures, discussion forums. Arguably traditional VLEs had (and still have) plenty more digital tools in their box than is offered by the MOOC platforms, so plenty more potential for learning, right? So why did we have to wait over a decade to see these 'break through' so strongly with their 'transformative' nature? I think the answer is more complex, and I'll start by unpacking 3 concepts, which are crucial to understanding how I will conduct my research project.

1. the numbers of learners involved in the learning experience
2. to what degree their participation can count as learning
3. the digital tools that are available as enablers for learning