Experiencing a MOOC
I joined a MOOC this week, to experience open learning and critically appraise it. The MOOC I joined is one of the Future Learn courses and the topic is ‘Food as Medicine’, something I have had an interest in for some time.
The way the course is set up, there are 23 activities to work through for this week, most of which are short articles of information, sometimes a video or a combination of both. The students are then encouraged to comment on specific questions and interact with each other in the comment section. This set up is a bit similar to the forum IDEL uses, but with much more students. There is a real lack of referencing in the articles, although the information clearly has to be imported from somewhere. To create articles this concise (the average length is between 500-1000 words) the information has to be extremely condensed, especially in a topic as big as ‘Food as Medicine’. These two factors together are quite worrying in terms of inclusion and accountability; being unable to see where the information has come from makes it harder to see what has been left out as well. Without this context of the origin of the information, it could be used ‘as if’ in learning (Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter 2018) but the teacher would be unable to place or ‘remix it’ with their own materials properly (Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter 2018).
The MOOC course is very teacher – light and seems created with the idea of social learning in mind where a (in this case large) group of students can help each other with learning; ‘we participate, therefore we learn’ (Brown & Adler 2008) through comments on the forums and ‘likes’ on comments from other students. Here we see once again the idea that students are self – motivated and self-directing (Biesta 2012) whilst learning. There is a teacher on this course, but one teacher for several thousand students can hardly be called a presence.
The 23 activities are short and this leads to a kind of bite- sized learning. There are a lot of little tasks that need to be completed on the course, often taking no more than a few minutes to complete. And although this seems like a good thing because it means the course can be done anywhere and pretty much at any time, I think it makes the learning very fragmented. This is of course made possible by the fluidity of the current learning spaces through technology (Bayne et al 2014) like smart phones and other hand held mobile devices. This extreme fragmentation of a subject is a worrying development which is visible throughout modern society as a whole. Most people do not take the time to watch a long film, but prefer shorter, more bite sized series. Even within films, the tempo is a lot higher and we are bombarded at times by many shots a minute instead of long leisurely shots in the 3 to 4 hour films of the 1950’s. Similarly, we don’t take the time to read a whole newspaper, but read a quick article on our smartphone. I could go on, but is has made me wonder if our attention span is more limited and therefore the learning condensed down to bite sized chunks, or are we limiting our attention span by using bite sized chinks to learn?
Bayne, S., Gallagher, M.S., & Lamb, J. (2014). Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students. Higher Education, 67(5), pp. 569-583.
Biesta, G. (2012). Giving teaching back to education: responding to the disappearance of the teacher. Phenomenology & Practice, 6(2), pp. 35-49.
Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds on fire: open education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), pp. 16–32.
Hodgkinson-Williams, C. A., & Trotter, H. (2018). A Social Justice Framework for Understanding Open Educational Resources and Practices in the Global South. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3), 204-224.
Interesting, interesting insights here. Your highlighting the lack of good academic practices on referencing is really interesting. Does this lack of transparency reinforce the authority position of the teacher? You simply have to take their word that this information is correct and the more relevant. Similarly, while the teacher presence may not be much in terms of interaction with participants, is it located in the presentation of the material itself and is that sufficient for this duration and level of course? As you say, this design and experience does reinforce Knox’s argument that these MOOCs assume a self-directing and self-regulating learner.
I like your highlighting of the chunking of material and shorter attention spans. Cal Newport makes the point that there is a huge professional/ career advantage to be had by developing the ability to focus and engage in deep work over long periods (like, more the 45 minutes!).
Thanks Peter, I watched a TEDx talk that Cal Newport did about social media which was very interesting.. If I wanted to delve deeper into this, which of his articles / books would you recommend?
Well, there are his books – especially “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism” – but having a look around his blog at https://www.calnewport.com/blog/ seems to cover an awful lot. I’m not a major fan partly because in Deep Work he is largely advocating a very self-centred view of work that relies on his colleagues doing the hidden academic work that he advocates we should reject yet still needs to be done (the position he adopts is perhaps particularly viable in HE systems that have tenure as well). But the broader message around deep work and focus I think does ring true.