Massive Open Online Courses(MOOCs)

Gráinne Conole, University of LeicesterDL Forum

26th March 2013

National Teaching Fellow 2012

ASCILITE Fellow 2012

Outline

• What are they?• Evolving MOOC landscape• Design principles• Pros and Cons• The OLDS MOOC• Disaggregation of Education

Image by James Cridland

100 million adults can’t afford university (UNESCO)

What are they?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc

Evolving MOOC landscape

• Online course with large-scale participation adopting open practices

• 2008 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge

• cMOOCs and xMOOCs• Key players: Coursera,

edX, Udacity• Now: FutureLearn and a

new Oz platformhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a2cEzsMEMY

Design principles

• Aggregation• Remixing• Re-purposing• Feeding forward• Personalised • Multiple channels• No ‘right’ pathway

http://www.flickr.com/photos/14852568@N04/3363891963/

FreeDistributed global community

Social inclusion

High dropout ratesLearning income not learning outcome

Marketing exercise

Pros and cons

http://alternative-educate.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/audio-ascilite-2012-great-debate-moocs.html

http://www.olds.ac.uk/

Resources Learning pathways

Support Accreditation

Disaggregation of education

http://openclipart.org/

The OER movement

• Over ten years of the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement

• Hundreds of OER repositories worldwide

• Presence on iTunesU Podcasts - iTunes U

The OPAL metromap

http://www.oer-quality.org/

Evaluation shows lack of uptake by teachers and learnersShift from development to community building and articulation of OER practice

POERUP outputs

• An inventory of more than 100 OER initiatives http://poerup.referata.com/wiki/Countries_with_OER_initiatives

• 11 country reports and 13 mini-reports http://poerup.referata.com/wiki/Countries

• 7 in-depth case studies• 3 EU-wide policy papers

State of the art in OER

• Builds on a UNESCO conference on HE (09)

• Discourse on policy and practice

• How do institutions reposition themselves in an information rich world where tools and resources are freely available?

http://www.col.org/resources/publications/Pages/detail.aspx?PID=412

Combating social exclusion

• Completely open• Free• Education for all• Easy to access and use• Crosses boundaries• Access to new knowledge

and expertise• Aggregation of resources• Sharing ideas and practice• Facilitates the

development of networks

Learning pathways

• Guided pathways through materials

• Can promote different pedagogical approaches– Didactic– Constructivist– Situative– Connectivist

Collaborative Pedagogical Patterns

Support

• Computer assisted• Peer support• Tutor support• Community support• Mentoring

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24289877@N02/5851058394/

Accreditation

www.p2pu.org/en/Peer to Peer University

wikieducator.org/OER_university/OER University

http://openbadges.org/Mozilla badges

Changing practices

• Nature of learning, teaching and research is changing

• It’s about– Harnessing new media– Adopting open practices

• New business models are emerging

http://www.slideshare.net/GrainneConolehttp://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance

grainne.conole@le.ac.ukhttp://e4innovation.com