In this presentation Stephen Downes addresses the question of how massive open online courses (MOOCs) will impact the future of distance education. The presentation considers in some detail the nature and purpose of a MOOC in contrast with traditional distance education. He argues that MOOCs represent the resurgence of community-based learning and will describe how distance education institutions will share MOOCs with each other and will supplement online interaction with community-based resources and services. The phenomenon of 'wrapped MOOCs' will be described, and Downes will outline several examples of local support for global MOOCs. The implications for the French-speaking world of distance education will be considered, and Downes will outline strategies and examples of the use of MOOCs to promote linguistic diversity.
What is a MOOC?
Thank you, it is a pleasure to be able to be here today. [slide 1 ? MOOC Wordle]
My objective in this talk is to address how the massive open online course (MOOC) will impact the future of distance education, and in particular, strategies and examples of the use of MOOCs to promote cultural and linguistic diversity.
The proposition I will offer is that MOOCs give us a new way to understand learning, and hence, a new way to understand certain types of learning, such as for example learning that supports diversity in language and culture.
To be clear, my expertise is in the field of open online learning, and not in the field of cultural and linguistic diversity. So my talk can only carry the discussion a certain distance. My hope is to offer a starting point for this discussion.
And I want to be clear that when I talk about a MOOC, I am talking about a different kind of learning. Most of you will be familiar with the traditional online course, which is based on the presentation of content and information, and based on a clear curriculum which is to be learned.
And the MOOCs you may have read about in the newspaper, the online courses offered though American universities such as Harvard and Stanford and MIT, these MOOCs are also examples of traditional online learning, with content and curriculum.
My understanding of the term ?MOOC? is a bit different; it is derived from a theory of learning based on engagement and interaction within a community of practitioners, without predetermined outcomes, and without a body of knowledge that we can simply ?transfer? to the learner.
And my understanding of the term ?MOOC? is based on five years of experience developing and offering MOOCs, from the very first MOOC, ?CCK08?, created by George Siemens and myself in 2008, and run a total of four time in the years following, to MOOCs in personal learning envrionemnts, critical literacies, and more.
So, first I will talk about what I mean by a MOOC and expand a bit on MOOC pedagogy. Then I will talk about the outcomes of a MOOC and the purpose of offering or taking a MOOC. Then I will address the relation between MOOC and community, and finally I will make some observations and offer some examples showing how MOOCs can promote cultural and linguistic diversity.
[slide 2 ? MOOC] To begin, then, with the definition: The term MOOC as is commonly known stands for ?Massive Open Online Course?. That gives us four terms: ?massive?, ?open?, ?online?, and ?course?.
There have been numerous efforts recently to define each of these four terms, sometimes in such a way as to result in an interpretation opposite to the common understanding of the term. To some people, a MOOC may be thought of as a small, closed, and offline.
In my opinion, we should be relatively rigid in our definition of a MOOC, if for no other reason than to distinguish a MOOC from the other forms of online learning that have existed before and since, and hence to identify those aspects of quality that are unique to MOOCs. Hence, a MOOC is to my mind, defined along the following four dimensions:
[slide 3 ? massive] Massive - here I mean not necessarily the success of the MOOC in attracting many people, but in the design elements that make educating many people possible. And here we need to keep in mind that to educate is to do more than merely deliver content, and more than to merely support interaction, for otherwise the movie theatre and the telephone system are, respectively, MOOCs.
My own theory of education is minimal. It is so minimal it hardly qualifies as a theory, and is almost certainly not my own: ?to teach is to model and to demonstrate; to learn is to practice and reflect.?
Thus, minimally, we need an environment that supports all four of these on a massive scale. In practice, what this means is a system designed so that bottlenecks are not created in any of the four attributes: modeling, demonstration, practice, and reflection.
To offer a simple example: an important part of reflection is the capacity to perform and then discuss performance with others. If each person must perform and discuss the performance with a specific person, such as the teacher, then a bottleneck is created, because there is not enough time to allow a large number of people to perform.
Similarly, if each performance and discussion involves the entire class, the same sort of bottleneck is created. Hence, in order for a course to be massive, performance and reflection must be designed in such a way that does not require that certain people view all performances.
You may ask, why would it be necessary for a course to be massive? Indeed, this seems to run against what we know of teaching and learning, where we want smaller class sizes and personal attention from an instructor. And this is quite true, if we think of ?massive? in the sense of ?mass media? or ?mass lectures?. These become ineffective precisely because they become impersonal.
But at the same time, if we depend on individual tutoring to propagate and promote any sort of culture, whether it be the culture of physicists or the culture of francophones, we will find progress in promoting that culture slow and expensive.
What we are attempting to repeat on a massive scale in a MOOC is not the delivery of instruction or the management of learning resources. We are trying to emulate, on a massive scale, these small-scale and personal one-to-one interactions. It is this interaction that is the most significant in learning, but also often the most important, and for a course to be truly massive, it must enable, and even encourage, hundreds or even thousands of these small interpersonal interactions.
[slide 4 ? open] Open ? I have had many arguments with people over the years regarding the meaning of ?open?, and in my opinion these arguments have most always involved the other people attempting to define ?open? in such a way as to make ?open? mean the same as ?closed?.
There are different senses of the word ?open? in education. The word ?open? is a single word in English that corresponds to three separate words in French:
First, there is the sense of ?open? as in ouvert. This is the sense of ?open admissions? in education, where there are no academic barriers to admission to a course.
Second, there is the sense of ?open? as in gratis. This is the sense of ?open access?, where there is no fee or tuition or subscription charge required in order to access a resource.
Third, there is the sense of ?open? as in libre. This is the sense of ?open educational resource?, where a resource that one has accessed to may be reused in any way desired, without limitations.
For my own part, the meaning of ?open? has more to do with access to a resource, as opposed to having to do with what one can do with a resource. The definition of ?open source software?, or ?free software?, for example, assumes that the software is already in your possession, and defines ways you can inspect it, run it, and distribute it, without limitations.?
But this definition is meaningless to a person who, for whatever reason, cannot access the software in the first place. The more common and widely understood meanings of ?free? and ?open? are broader in nature, more permissive with regard to access, and more restrictive with regard to the imposition of barriers.
In particular, something (a resource, a course, an education) is free and open if and only if:
- the resource may be read, run, consumed or played without cost or obligation. This addresses not only direct fee-for-subscription, but also enclosure, for example, the bundling of ?free? resources in such a way that only those who pay tuition may access them
- there are reasonable ways to share the resource or to reuse the resource, and especially to translate or format-shift the resource? (but not necessarily to be able to sell or modify the resource)
Having said that, as George Siemens and I discussed the development of MOOCs in 2008, we were conscious of and communicated the fact that we were engaged in a progression of increasingly open access to aspects of education:
????????????? first, open access to educational resources, such as texts, guides, exercises, and the like
????????????? next, open access to curriculum, including course content and learning design
????????????? third, open access to criteria for success, or rubrics (which could then be used by ourselves or by others to conduct assessments)
????????????? fourth, open assessments (this was something we were not able to provide in our early courses)
????????????? fifth open credentials
And by the term ?open? we very clearly intended both the aspects of access and sharing to be included; what this meant in practice was that we expected course participants not only to use course resources, curriculum, etc., but also to be involved in the design of these.
Hence, for example, before we offered CCK08, we placed the course schedule and curriculum on a wiki, where it could be edited by those who were interested in taking the course (this was a strategy adapted from the ?Bar Camp? school of conference organization and the EduCamp model as employed by Nancy White and Diego Leal).
It is interesting to contrast our approach to ?open? with the ?logic model? devised by James C. Taylor? and eventually adopted by OERu which preserved the openness of resources and courses, but kept closed access to assessments and credentials.
Such courses are not to my mind ?open courses? as a critical part of the course is held back behind a tuition barrier. Exactly the same comment could be made of ?free? courses that entail the purchase of a required textbook. Just because some part of a course is free or open does not entail that the course as a whole is free or open, and it is a misrepresentation to assert such.
Why make our courses open? Think of a course as like a language. If a language is closed, it dies. If people are not allowed to speak it, it dies. To enable people to genuinely participate in the culture of a discipline, whether it be physics or chemistry or political science, the content and the materials of the discipline must be open.
There is the danger that a cultural or linguistic group will retreat into itself in the face of this risk. I look, for example, at the state of publishing in communities like Finland or Sweden, and find that open access is very limited, as the publishers imagine that there is no other place for Finnish or Swedish speakers to turn. But they do turn, as we know, to open online content in English.
[slide 5 ? online] Online ? I have noticed recently the phenomenon of ?wrapped? MOOCs, which postulate the use of a MOOC within the context of a traditional location-based course; the material offered by the MOOC is hence ?wrapped? with the trappings of a more traditional education. This is the sort of approach to MOOCs which treats them more as modern-day textbooks, rather than as courses in and of themselves.??
But insofar as these wrapped MOOCs are courses, they are no longer online, and insofar as they are online, they are no longer courses. So whatever a ?wrapped MOOC? is, it is not a MOOC. It is (at best) a set of resources misleadingly identified as a ?MOOC? and then offered (or more typically, sold) as a means to supplement traditional courses.
For a MOOC to be ?online? entails that (and I?ll be careful with my wording here) no required element of the course is required to take place at any particular physical location.
The ?wrapped MOOCs? are not MOOCs because you cannot attend a wrapped MOOC without attending the in-person course; there will be aspects of the MOOC that are reserved specifically for the people who have (typically) paid tuition and are resident at some college or university, and are physically located at the appropriate campus at the appropriate time.?
Just as being online is what makes it possible for these courses to be both massive and open, being located at a specific place makes the course small and closed.
But this does not mean MOOCs cannot include or allow elements of real-world interaction or activity. Indeed, the best use of a MOOC does entail some offline real-world activity.
For example, our original CCK08 MOOC recommended, but did not require, in-person meet-ups, for example, and these were held at various locations around the world. MOOCs such as ds106 require that a person go out into the world and take photographs (for example).
In any online course there will be a real-world dimension; what makes it an ?online? course is that it does not specify a particular real-world dimension. I will talk much more about this in a few minutes.
[slide 6 ? course] Course ? before we launched our first MOOC both George Siemens and I were involved in various activities related to free and open online learning.
George, for example, had staged a very successful online conference on Connectivism the year before. I had, meanwhile, been running my newsletter service for the educational technology community since 2001. Each of these was in its own way massive, open and online, but they were not courses.
There is obviously some overlap between ?course? and ?conference? and ?community?, and people have since suggested that there could be (or should be) massive open online communities of practice? and of course there could ? but they are not MOOCs.
There is also some overlap between the concept of the ?course? and the ?course package?, as in, for example, the self-paced self-study online learning packages first distributed on paper (and with audio tapes) by distance education institutions. Here, the overlap is so great, they are often misleadingly called ?courses? instead of ?course packages?.
To be clear: I am very supportive of the idea of massive open online communities, and I am also supportive of the use of course packages, but the MOOC is a different entity, with its own properties and role in the environment. But a course is an event. A community is not and event. A course package is not an event.
And specifically:
????????????? a course is bounded by a start date and an end date
????????????? a course is cohered by some common theme or domain of discourse
????????????? a course is a progression of ordered events related to that domain
Why insist on these? Aside, that is, from the pedantic observation that if you call something a ?course? then it ought to have the properties of a course?
My own observation is that the creation of temporary and bounded events allows for engagement between communities that would not normally associate with each other. Courses are a way of, if you will, stirring the pot. By creating a limited and self-contained event we lower the barriers to participation ? you?re not signing up for a lifetime commitment ? and hence increasing accessibility.
In a sense, the same reason we organize learning into courses is the reason we organize text into books. Yes, simply ?reading? is useful and engaging, and widely recommended, but ?reading a book? is defined and contained. A person can commit to ?reading a book? more easily than to ?reading?, especially if by ?reading? we mean something that never ends.
Hence, massive open online learning that is not bounded, does not cohere around a subject, and is not a progression of ordered events, is not a course, and outside the domain of discourse.
MOOC Pedagogy
[slide 7 ? pedagogy] The way we set up a MOOC is to define a six or twelve (or even thirty) week course of readings, each on a different topic, progressing through a domain of enquiry. We also hosted online seminars, many of which featured guest experts from outside the course.
But there the similarity with a traditional course ends. We do not require that people study the readings; these are optional. Rather, what we are saying through this structure is that we, the course authors, will be studying these materials. And people are welcome to come along for the ride.
What is important about a connectivist course is not the course content. Yes, there is some content -- you can't have a conversation without it -- but the content isn't the important thing. It serves merely as a catalyst, a mechanism for getting our projects, discussions and interactions off the ground. It may be useful to some people, but it isn't the end product, and we certainly do not want people to memorize it.
Let me explain why we take this approach.
[slide 8 ? neuronsk] Our thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not transmitted, as though it were some type of communication. You can?t ?promote? something simply by assembling course packages and sending them out into the world.
The things we learn and the things we know are literally the connections we form between neurons as a result of experience. The brain is composed of 100 billion neurons, and these form some 100 trillion connections and it is these connections that constitute everything we know, everything we believe, everything we imagine.
And while it is convenient to talk as though knowledge and beliefs are composed of sentences and concepts that we somehow acquire and store, it is more accurate -- and pedagogically more useful -- to treat learning as the formation of connections.
From the perspective of the course, what it means is that the process of taking the course is itself much more important than the content participants may happen to learn in the course. The idea of a connectivist course is that a learner is immersed within a community of practitioners and introduced to ways of doing the sorts of things practitioners do, and through that practice, becomes more similar in act, thought and values to members of that community. To learn physics, in other words, you join a community of physicists, practice physics, and thereby become like a physicist.
[slide 9 ? language] It is, indeed, like the learning of a language. It is possible to learn a language in theory, by studying books, as though one would study Latin. But to learn a language fully it is essential to immerse oneself in the day-to-day activities and culture of the people who speak it.
Again, it is tempting to say that there are certain things that people learn when they learn a language, that there is some content that is essential to being a speaker of that language. The meaning of words, for example, or the conjugation of verbs. But this is misleading and wrong.
Dictionary meanings and verb conjugations are, at the very best, an abstraction of the much more complex set of practices, attitudes and beliefs common among physicists. Because it is an abstraction, such a description cannot be accurate, and may actually mislead people about what being a physicist actually entails.
A person who merely knew the content supposedly taught and tested for at a language academy would feel grossly out of place in a gathering of physicists. It's like knowing the words but not knowing the tune.
So what a connectivist course becomes is a community of educators attempting to learn how it is that they learn, with the objective of allowing them to be able to help other people learn. We are all educators, or at least, learning to be educators, creating and promoting the (connective) practice of education by actually practicing it.
In practice connectivist teaching and learning consists of four major sorts of activities (and remember, this is just an abstraction, not a definition; just a starting point, and not 'content' to be remembered):
[slide 10 - aggregate] Aggregation - the point of offering a course at all is to provide a starting point, to provide a variety of things to read, watch or play with. There is a lot of content associated with the course, everything from relatively basic instruction to arguments and discussions to high-level interviews with experts in the field.
The course is composed not only of recommended readings but also articles, videos and recordings made by course facilitators, blog posts, images, videos and other recordings made by course participants, collected tweets from Twitter, bookmarks from Delicious, discussion posts, and whatever else we can think of.
What we have experienced after delivering a half-dozen MOOCs is that we have to tell people at the start of the course to pick and choose what they will read, watch or participate in. Again and again, we have to stress that there is no central content to the course, that each person creates their own perspective on the material by selecting what seems important to them.
Again, if we draw the comparison to learning a language, it is like telling a person to pick and choose from real books, real newspaper articles, and real conversations.
From the perspective of the course provider, what is important at this point is that there actually be a rich range of resources, open and freely accessible, that can be used by course participants. In any course, in any discipline, I am looking for a wide range of resources, and encouraging course participants to do the same.
The key here is diversity. This includes diversity of format: we want texts, videos, animations, games, seminars, and anything else, because people prefer to use different media. But it also includes different languages and perspectives. In any MOOC ? and not simply MOOCs designated as French-language, it would be relevant to include French-language resources.
One of the things I have learned in learning more than one language is that each language views the world differently, represents the world differently.
[slide 11 ? remix] Remixing - the next step is to draw connections. The idea is to associate the materials (or parts of the materials) with each other, and with materials from elsewhere.
There are different ways to associate materials -- typically we look for some sort of commonality, such as a term, reference, topic or category. Sometimes we look for a fit, as though one thing follows from another. There are no rules to association, and part of learning is to get a feel for what goes with what.
The main point here is to encourage people to keep track of this. We suggest that they keep records on their computers of all the documents they've accessed, perhaps with summaries or evaluations of the material. Or, better yet, they can keep a record online somewhere. That way they will be able to share their content with other people.
In the course we make some specific suggestions:
- Create a blog with Blogger. Go to http://www.blogger.com and create a new blog. Or, if you already have a blog, you can use your existing blog. You can also use Wordpress (http://www.wordpress.com) or any other blogging service. Each time you access some content, create a blog post.
- Create an account with del.icio.us and create a new entry for each piece of content you access.
- Take part in an online discussion. You can, for example, join a Google group and exchange thoughts with other course participants, or use the discussion forum provided in the course's online environment.
- Tweet about the item in Twitter. If you have a Twitter account, post something about the content you've accessed.
- Anything else: you can use any other service on the internet -- Flickr, Second Life, Yahoo Groups, Facebook, YouTube, anything! Use your existing accounts if you want or create a new one especially for this course. The choice is completely yours.
What we are encouraging here especially is a mixing of diverse cultures. We are not trying to create a blend, but to highlight the distinctive perspective offered by each. You can see here that an ideal MOOC requires participation from different societies and different linguistic groups.
People often ask whether there are any French-language MOOCs and French-language learning resources, and this is a fair question. For me, though, the deeper question is whether there is any French-language culture attached to existing courses.
We saw this in our connectivist MOOCs through the activities of the Spanish-speaking community, the ?connectvistas?, who would organize their own events, in their own language, online and offline, around our open online course. And their perspective became an important part of our online course, and Spanish ideas and culture became a part of the subject matter itself.
[slide 12 ? repurpose] Repurposing - we don't want participants to simply repeat what other people have said. Learning is not simply a process of reception and filtering. It is important to create something, to actively participate in the discipline.
This is probably the hardest part of the process, and not everybody will participate at this level (we remind participants, you get out of the course what you put into it; there's no magic here).
But it is important to remember that creativity does not start from scratch. There is this myth that we stare at a blank sheet of paper, and that ideas then spring out of our heads. But it's just a myth. Nobody ever creates something from nothing. That's why we call this section 'repurpose' instead of 'create.'
The materials were aggregated and remixed online are the bricks and mortar that can be used to compose new thoughts and new understandings of the material. What thoughts? What understanding? That is what we are creating in the course.
Repurposing is often a process of translating ? taking an idea from one culture and representing it in the forms and idioms of another culture. This may be as simple as translating a block ofSource: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2013/05/mooc-resurgence-of-community-in-online.html
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