Beyond the ‘c-’ and the ‘x-’: new

paradigms for MOOC learning

Dr Jeremy Knox

The University of Edinburgh

@j_k_knox

jeremyknox.net

MOOCs, Informal Language Learning, and Mobility Open University, October 2016

Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/moocs-are-still-rising-at-least-in-numbers/57527

• Reputation – early adopter of educational technology

• Exploration of a new pedagogical

‘space’ to inform practice • Wish to reach as widely as we can with

our courses • Sharing experiences with peer

universities

• Not a replacement for on-campus

taught degrees, but also not in conflict or competition with them.

• A different educational space –

open education

#edcmooc

E-learning and Digital Cultures

‘connectivism’

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008

For profit, independent of any institution

For profit, partnered with 119 institutions

Non-profit, currently partnered with 81 organisations

‘when it was simply open vs. closed there was a clear distinction: Openness was good, closed was bad. As the victory bells sound, though, it doesn’t take much examination to reveal that it has become a more complex picture’ (p.21). an adversarial framing of openness (p.153) Weller, M., 2014. The Battle For Open: How openness won and why it doesn’t feel like victory, London: Ubiquity Press. Available at: http://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/books/detail/11/battle-for-open/

Open education: the need for a critical approach Learning, Media and Technology Volume 40, Issue 3, 2015. Special Issue: Critical Approaches to Open Education

Stewart, B., 2013. Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation? MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Technology, 9(2), pp.228–238

• ‘Massive’ to small and private • Specialisations • Data and analytics

‘massiveness’ >> small and private

900,000 registered on the 16 Edinburgh

MOOCs

32,868 studying at the University

of Edinburgh

Knox, J. (2014). Digital culture clash: “massive” education in the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC. Distance Education, 35(2), 164–177. http://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2014.917704

Coursera for Teams

Next month, we'll be launching Coursera for Teams to provide small-to-medium sized businesses and other organizations with a simple self-serve group learning experience. Team managers will be able to bulk pay for selected courses, invite team members to enroll, and view a summary of their team members’ progress and engagement through a private analytics dashboard.

Auto-cohorts

specialisations…

with Humanities courses declining rapidly from 20 percent of overall subject distribution in 2013 to less than 10 percent in 2015. This shifting distribution shows a pattern of prioritizing career outcomes for learners who are either on the job market or already in the workforce, specifically, that of technology. “The Big 3″ providers, Coursera, Udacity, and edX are shedding their free and open roots one-by-one

(Online Course Report 2016. Available at: https://www.onlinecoursereport.com/state-of-the-mooc-2016-a-year-of-massive-landscape-change-for-massive-open-online-courses/)

…data and analytics

• Content • Interaction and communication • Assessment • Learning?

…quantifying participant behaviours, categorising students into groups profiling: • age • gender • nationality • educational background • occupation • mother tongue • motivations for enrolling different categorisations of MOOC participation: • experienced and novice participants (Waite et al. 2013) • ‘certified’, ‘only explored’, ‘only viewed’ and ‘only registered’ (Ho et al. 2014) • ‘active’ and ‘passive’ participation’, and ‘lurking’ (Milligan et al. 2013)

Milligan, C., Littlejohn, A. & Margaryan, A., 2013. Patterns of Engagement in Connectivist MOOCs. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2), pp.149–159. Available at: http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no2/milligan_0613.htm. Waite, M. et al., 2013. Liminal Participants and Skilled Orienteers: Learner Participation in a MOOC for New Lecturers. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 9(2). Available at: http://jolt.merlot.org/vol9no2/waite_0613.htm.

DATA

data colonialism (Knox 2015, 2016)

Knox, J. (forthcoming 2016). Posthumanism and the MOOC: Contaminating the Subject of Global Education. Routledge Knox, J. (forthcoming 2015) What’s the matter with MOOCs? Sociomaterial methodologies for educational research. In H. Snee, C. Hine, Y. Morey, S. Roberts, H. Watson (Eds.) Digital Methods for Social Science. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Knox, J. (2016). Posthumanism and the MOOC: Contaminating the Subject of Global Education. Routledge