Jeremy Knox gave a philosophically interesting talk about the effects of MOOCs on education. For a in-depth information, have a look at his recently published wonderful book. What follows are liveblogging notes.
How has the movement of cMOOC/xMOOCs impacted informal
learning. This talk is on the emergence of MOOCs and their dominant forms, as
well as suggest some new paradigms for MOOC learning (not new theories, but
important movements and things that are happening and influence how we
understand learning in the MOOC domain).
Looking back to the 2012 and 2013 where the media got
interested in the rise of the MOOC. Promising a revolution of education, the
future of Higher Education, which were provocative and aimed at bringing moocs
into the main stream. One of the premises was “the online revolution, learning
without limits” a quote from Daphne Koller at Stanford. Many advantages came
from raising digital education into the mainstream of education. But at the
same time the rise of the MOOC is a fact, MOOCs are here to stay.
In the eLearning and digital cultures MOOC came up with
embedding resources that were open and public. That evoked the idea of
hybridMOOC (Bonnie Stewart). cMOOCs focused more on open and public web,
self-directed study, process oriented. While xMOOC were more open in terms of
free enrolment, free lectures, content oriented. The quality of the openness we
saw in cMOOCs was about practicing learning and teaching in the open public
realm. While xMOOC are open in terms of ‘free’ not really open in the open
education idea.
The Open Educational Resources movement comes from several
regional initiatives, and influences the cMOOCs.
The very idea of connectivism was on the idea of a network.
A special visualisation of a cMOOC points to the learning that happens in a
cMOOC, distributed knowledge and content. When looking at the different xMOOCs,
we see for profit, to non-profit. This means that these MOOCs have a profit
idea behind them as well. In contrast to the network model of connectivist
MOOCs.
The xMOOCs have lots of fantastic moocs, but the reinstate
the lecture. And the global North dominates the content and production, which
is a different interpretation of what is open education. Martin Weller conveys
the idea well in his The battle for open: how openness won and why it does not
feel like a victory (Weller, 2014). Bonnie Stewart compared xMOOC to a trojan horse
for open education.
But there is more than the battle for open, that is a move
from massive to spocs, specialisation (spocs) and learning analytics. There is
a huge number of learners enrolled in MOOCs, so that is a good thing, learning
is happening and it is more than we got in traditional education. The argument
is that after the initial emergence of MOOCs, there was a move against the
massive, and more towards community open online courses, so moving away of the
massive. Harvard sees an interest in spocs, business idea. But this means that
moocs return to the classic online or elearning courses. Coursera moves towards
team moocs, or auto-cohorts: a new coursera does a kind of bus, once it is full
of people it starts. So two options of managing class sizes. This means it goes
back to what was.
Specialisations of MOOCs: group mooc courses together, this
sequencing enables certification. This specialisation initiative focuses on
disciplines, this has an effect on humanities course, declining rapidly from
20% to 10% shifting distribution of these courses. Specialisations seem to
focus on stem, business, data science and computer science. This means that the
focus is shifting with specialisation. Similar to the turn that Udacity took to
predominantly focus on these types of courses, not the humanities or other less
tech-oriented courses. The need to profit will change the priorities and
resources they put into moocs.
MOOCs are also shaped by data or learning analytics.
Content, interaction & communication, assessment… but what about the actual
learning. And the quantifying participant
behaviours, into categorise students into groups that are not necessary
meaningful for learning. Data colonialism emerges, that what we are seeing with
MOOCs is not a traditional colonialism, it is a drive to capture more data to
make more judgements, new sensibilities are needed to make learning analytics
less colonial.
Question: what is the chance that we can reverse this new
colonialist drive now using learning analytics to roll out this new type of education?
Jeremy stays optimistic on the opportunities we can create, but this means we
need to look at algorithms supporting learning analytics, look at the
categories that are used and the effect it has. (inge remark: can we and do we
equip global tech with the algorithms that can in fact try and reach education for
all and equality for all? Even if we use the technologies as used in cmoocs
e.g. twitter, FB… which are also part of the technological symbolic capital
from the Northern regions). Jeremy mentions how the data analytics from global
MOOC’rs were used to improve for on location students within Harvard and
Stanford, so what is the actual benefit for a global group of learners? MOOCs
are used as motivational device to attract on location students, preserve the
authenticity of the institutes that provide MOOCs, which does not belittle the
work teachers do or the work that learners do, but does speak against the
global educational benefit that MOOCs said to achieve.
