40 Tips for running an Open Online Course or MOOC from those who have experienced them

To coincide with the announcement of a new Learning Design MOOC (now confirmed as starting in January 2013) some of those registering have been invited to tell us about their previous experiences of participating, or helping organise, open online courses. Information about MOOCs can be difficult to come by, so the thirty-five responses we have received so far (which cover 50 separate experiences of 25 different MOOCs) represents a really interesting dataset.

In the survey we asked people about what they had liked and disliked about the MOOCs they had been involved with, what the MOOC did well and not so well, how the issues they had encountered could be resolved and what advice they would give to others planning a MOOC. I’ve taken these responses and attempted to express these as a series of tips – each tip based directly on one or more pieces of advice, suggestions or experiences reported by the survey respondents.

If you would like to add your experiences to those already contributed, please visit the survey. Also, as this survey represents the first stage in a broader schedule of monitoring and evaluation for the MOOC, watch out for further reporting over the next six months.

So here are 40 Tips for running a MOOC (in no particular order)…

1. Be clear about what type of MOOC you are planning  – there is no one way of doing a MOOC for, just like any course, it may draw on constructivism, instructivism,  connectivism etc. (or any combination). Be clear about the pedagogy even if just within your design team.

2. Ensure a balance between the suggested activities (those you have designed) and time allowed for participants to develop/build from them

3. Ensure the course rewards participation – some will be motivated by the promise of awards such as badges or certificates however for others the benefit of an enriching experience, helping others, social interaction over a share interest, or better understanding themselves may be as, if not more, important.

4. Ensure the course mechanics/design focuses on achieving a coalescing or binding together of knowledge  – so as to avoid a spiralling fragmentation of posts, content and participation and generating what one respondent termed ‘too much noise’

5. Consider the expectations and skills of those who will be involved – what are the prerequisite skills required? At what point might the degree of difference between participants become an issue?

 6. Provide ‘plenty of structure’ in terms of activities, group working and website organisation/navigation – yet also ensure such structure is not a constraint for those who want to go further or to reorganise knowledge in different ways. Consider the negative impact on motivation some feel during scripted courses and, conversely, others feel during very ‘open’ courses

7. Consider future participants as well as current participants – will the post, tweets, links etc make sense to someone new visiting the site in 6 months time? Will the course really be ‘open’ across time as well as open geographically at the time it takes place?

8. Expect a high-drop out rate – low barriers to entry may also mean low barriers to withdrawal or lower tolerance thresholds). Take the opportunity to reflect on what a drop-out rate of 50% or 90% of registrations would mean for your course, for the participants registering on the course and your own educational mission/purpose in organising it.

9. Create a sense of closure at the end of the course – for example, as one respondent suggests ‘an assessment, a designed activity or summary podcast’.

10. Build in the potential to scale-up (in terms of numbers), reach further (in terms of accessibility and portability) and be sustained (repeated in future)

11. Keep the pace and depth of topics higher than traditional face to face courses – and in making this change, ensure you recommend or estimate how long tasks should take

12. Determine and communicate a vision for how different forms of knowledge will be handled and privileged within the course – are some forms of knowledge more authoritative? Do anecdotal opinions carry equal weight to empirical published research?

Introducing learners to open distance learning: a new 1-2 hour study module

The openED online open distance course titled ‘Business and Management Competencies in a Web2.0 world’ commences its third presentation next week. As before, I’ll be involved in the research and evaluation of the course and the use by distance open learners of the website.

For this round, I’m also written a new additional module titled An Introduction to how to learn with open distance courses such as openED.  The aim of this module is to help the learner understand how to study better using open online material and should last 1-2 hours. This module is based on the most common questions asked by openED participants which I have identified from a detailed review of the Round 1 and Round 2 forums and over fifteen hours of text-chat session transcripts. The module uses examples from the openED course to help illustrate ‘real-world’ examples and includes three short reflective exercises (5-10 minutes) aimed at thinking how using online social spaces such as forums can enrich learning experiences. The module includes short sections on:

• What is open distance learning?
• When to start?
• How to study an open module
• Using forums to meet others, share work and resolve questions
• Live text-chat sessions
• Group working
• Getting feedback and recognition for your work

To see the module in situ check out the openED website. I have also made the original text document (3,600 words) available under a limited creative commons licence for reuse and repurposing. You can download it using this link: Introduction To How to Learn With Open Distance Courses_Cross_2011_v6  

One exciting feature of this module is my sharing with the learners a basic visual representation of the recommended learning route (learning design). I have of course had to abstract the design to suit any of the 10 mondules (each differs in content) so it does not convey the detail or nuance that I would often put in such designs. 

 

The intention is that participants work through the Introduction module first. This will better prepare them for the course modules and we will monitor how this contributes to greater or more prolonged engagement.

Altruism and OER /OED: sharing, charity and the process of giving

Read any article about open educational resources or designs and the term ‘sharing’ pops up time and again. Whilst an apparently innocuous, self-explanatory term, for something so closely bound to notions of openness of why we think people want and are open and of how we imagine the mechanism of interaction and co-creation of common resources, it is often evoked with scarily little critical reflection. I propose here that it can be a misnomer and, as such, is operating as much to obstruct our analysis and critical understanding of the mechanisms for enacting openness.

The idea of sharing refers to what could be termed ‘reciprocal altruism’ – a form of altruism where there is anticipated to be exchange of things, often of those judged of broadly similar value. This notion of reciprocal altruism, often with an emphasis on the interaction that takes place not reasons for it, forms a cornerstone of how many people imagine how open education systems will work and should be configured; designers exchange designs, students review each others work, teachers share their resources. Ask why they think such interaction will take place and either the fall-back position of reciprocal altruism is assumed accepts begrudgingly accepts conscious self-interest.

Yet psychological, sociological and economic research tells us that there is more to altruism than reciprocity or sharing. Altruism for example can also take the form of kin selection, or nepotism, with individuals supporting others seen as similar to themselves thereby binding communities closer together. It can also take the form of charity – the act of giving to a stranger; the understanding of this is fundamental to entire sectors!

It seems to me that focusing on the act of ‘giving’ – looking at individual and structural motivations, intents, behaviours and social norms – can enrich our models of OER use. What if we look to interpret contributions to OER repositories or other open learning and design repositories as acts of altruism such as charity or kin-selection? Can we use such perspectives to build a complete picture of what openness is or could be like?

So why do people ‘give’? There are many overlapping theories. One perspective holds that people give to feel good or better about themselves (even to remove a sense of guilt or obligation). This ‘warm glow’ comes from

Pedagogies that travel and those that don’t: Sustainability in open courses and learning design

Last week I presented a paper titled ‘Some Issues Affecting the Sustainability of Open Learning Courses’ written by James Aczel, myself and four other colleagues (2011) working on the EU funded openED project at the EDEN conference in Dublin. The aim of the project is to explore participatory learning in open educational environments by producing and delivering an online open/’free’ course is business management. In so doing, the objective is to not only to produce an OER, but to use open technology, open Web 2.0 methods of communication, open opportunity to facilitate, open peer assessment, and open opportunity to build a resource for reuse. So a key question for the project is to study the effect and issues around ‘opening’ up many aspects of a course together. And one of my roles in the project is to develop and deploy a complex of evaluation methodologies before, during and after each of our three rounds.

The theme of the conference was learning and sustainability and it was interesting to see the present state of thinking around how e-learning was seeking to frame and understand what ‘sustainable learning’ means. The two uses of the concept most prevalent were: 1. The planning to sustain project accomplishments or innovation, and 2. The teaching of themes associated with sustainability within a course. The first is clearly important to the longevity of a project but I find this