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Let's talk about MOOCs! Looking at the year of the MOOC (2012) and what we have learned/not learned about massive open online courses.
25 Years of Ed Tech is a serialized audio version of the book 25 Years of Ed Tech, written by Martin Weller of the Open University and published by AU Press. The audio version of the book is a collaborative project with a global community of volunteers contributing their voices to narrate a chapter of the book. Bonus episodes are a series of conversations called "Between the Chapters" to chat about these topics and more!
"In this lively and approachable volume based on his popular blog series, Martin Weller demonstrates a rich history of innovation and effective implementation of ed tech across higher education. From Bulletin Board Systems to blockchain, Weller follows the trajectory of education by focusing each chapter on a technology, theory, or concept that has influenced each year since 1994. Calling for both caution and enthusiasm, Weller advocates for a critical and research-based approach to new technologies, particularly in light of disinformation, the impact of social media on politics, and data surveillance trends. A concise and necessary retrospective, this book will be valuable to educators, ed tech practitioners, and higher education administrators, as well as students."
Credits:
Text in quotes from the book website published by Athabasca University Press CC-BY-NC-ND
BG music Abstract Corporate by Gribsound released under a CC-BY license. Track was edited for time.
Artwork X-Ray Specs by @visualthinkery is licenced under CC-BY-SA.
Audio book chapters produced by Clint Lalonde.
Between the Chapters bonus podcast episodes produced by Laura Pasquini.
0:03
Between the chapters, a weekly podcast discussion focusing on a chapter of the book, 25 years of edtech, written by Martin Weller. here's your host, Laura Pasquini.
0:15
Welcome to where we at chapter 19. It's 2012. And we're gonna talk about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, or I call the MOOCs. I'm with Rolin Moe, Sukaina Walji , and Dave Cormier, welcome, friends.
0:34
Thanks for having us.
0:36
Thank you.
0:37
Great to be here. Thank
0:38
you. That 2012 seems so long ago in the pandemic life we live. So I think we should reflect back to 2012. itself, where were you at? Was MOOCs part of your vernacular and how were you involved in it?
0:52
In 2012, MOOCs, were a little bit of a twinkle in my eye, rather than something that was really in front of me. But I was at that time, enrolled in my Master's in online and distance education at the European University, in fact, with Martin, so it was a very interesting time. And I, as a student, in educational technology, MOOCs were becoming more known. And I had an inkling and then one of the courses encouraged us to really explore the MOOC phenomenon further. And that's really when I started intellectually engaging. And we had an experience when Martin ran one of the modules we were enrolled with enrolled in as a MOOC. With some of the students as MOOC learners, some of the students enrolled learners. And so we had a kind of experience as well. But prior to that I had been involved in using open courseware. And oh, we are and at that time, in 2012, it felt a little bit like an expansion of that, you know, and I knew of the open courses such as the ones Dave had worked with, and offered. So it was, it was kind of in I was, in the beginning, beginning to be more immersed in that environment and feeling quite excited about it.
2:15
So by 2012, I was exhausted of MOOCs. We are in the midst of a 33 week MOOC called change 11, which was a terrible, terrible idea was also a bad name, because it actually went into 2012. But we had this idea that the moves we were doing, were too short. And so we should be doing longer ones, which just for the record is a bad idea. And so, at the same time, as of certainly 2011, when 165,000 decided to join some folks at in California in a course. And I believe as best as I've been able to trace it back, Audrey waters called that a MOOC, suddenly, the work that we were doing got attached to the multiple choice questionnaires that were being done by giant universities. And so suddenly, I was talking an awful lot about MOOCs in 2012. So I was getting phone calls from lots of people asking about its impact on the history of education, and what it meant and what we're going to do with it. So it was kind of a confusing time, it was one of those weird things where something you're doing in your backyard becomes really relevant to people who don't actually care about what you're doing in your backyard. So it's a super, super interesting time for me,
3:28
I came became aware of Dave's work, right around this time, I was a BD towards my doctorate. And at the time, I was looking at doing something about authentic interactions and assessments in non formal learning spaces, specifically museums. So how could we better engage these physical spaces and think about them in terms of the formalized education take the best of what you have in that immersive environment, but try and map out some of the things that we expect that we're supposed to have evidence for of learning? How can you kind of find a magic middle rather than what David Wiley would call a mediocre middle? And it was an interesting topic. But as we were, so we would come together as a group and have a couple days there was a writing coach in there. There's a stats person in here and we just had time to kind of sit and think. And the chair of the program, Linda polen, kind of noted that there was all this conversation out of what was going on at Stanford. And she said today what what you just said, like, how do they think they're going to make money. These are free courses. And I thought it was fascinating when you had this acronym that was really driving so much of the conversation because it sounded fancy, but it was one of the least fancy acronyms you could you could possibly imagine. And there was such a disconnect between all the research behind I think it's a good point to note. My undergraduate, one of my undergraduate English teachers was Brian Alexander. And so his work and talking about this, and you know, writing about it, and that's how I came to learn if Dave's video, the youtube viral sensation that talked about this. And so you had this huge disconnect, which was just fascinating to somebody who could do any sort of research they wanted at that moment. And so I just started reading about MOOCs. We had time I wasn't, I hate to say this, I wasn't really paying attention to what was going on, in the classes I was sitting in. So I was sitting and reading articles about MOOCs. And it was a lit review. So I was writing down my lit review. And I started a blog, which was all moocs.wordpress.com, all MOOCs all the time. And I did that for about six weeks. And I had maybe 45 or 50 followers on Twitter. I'd been on Twitter a couple years, I had done nothing on there. And then I was posting these things out there. And one day I log on, and I have 300 followers. Because George Siemens had retweeted something that I had written about connectivism. And that got people to MOOCs. And suddenly, here's this person who's just been doing research for two months on a topic. And I was getting phone calls from news outlets and organizations because there was no critical writing on the topic in one specific place. So where George and Dave and others had these blogs, they were covering all sorts of things. This blog was only covering MOOCs. And so people went there. And it was a good thing that my lit review was kind of, I was I was doing it right, because I suddenly had all this evidence out there on the web. And that got me wedded to MOOCs for three years. I could not get away from that for a long time.
6:49
Alright, so we've heard ready, can I free? I've heard that he drank the Kool Aid rollin Sukaina, you had the evangelist, I blame Martin, thank and blame them. And Dave, for happens when you write one explainer video, you just get contacted by all the news outlets, is that what happens?
7:04
So yeah, and I mean, actually, my name is attached to actually making up the word too. So sorry for all of you who have been stuck with it. But that did happen. And it did happen. Just like George and I were in a conversation. And I just said, Oh, well, you guys are doing this thing that summer. Let's call it blah, blah, blah. And, yeah, so suddenly, I get a call from the Wall Street Journal. And they're like, Hey, how are people gonna make money from MOOCs? And I'm like, you mean, the free courses we're talking about? I don't think there's a business model there as far as I understand business or model. And that's, that's kind of where was I get these conversations. And I was wholly unprepared as a participant in higher ed to take advantage of these things. So I didn't really take advantage of it. So I mostly said, No, this is a terrible idea. And these courses don't actually represent what MOOCs are, which was the position I was still holding in 2012. Was that these big courses that are being done at Stanford or MIT or wherever? They're not MOOCs, because they're not open. They're not open as in pedagogy. For sure, for sure. And because of that, I don't even consider them to be MOOCs, which was why they stopped calling, because I wasn't telling them what they wanted me to say.
8:15
So I guess I'll share my experience. I actually knew MOOCs before 2012. And I think I just blew up in whatever into my little Canadian realm. Alec choros, did the EC, I did look at my blog, EC831. Yeah, and CCK. We just connected,
8:32
C's connective knowledge connected, connected as a connective knowledge.
8:35
Thank you. And I did the oh nine, and maybe Oh, eight. But that started in Oh, seven. So I just knew these were good community spaces where I can learn from my peers, I never associated with any model. But this meant something in different parts of the world. So this is my Canadian stance at the time, I just moved to the US. And I was kind of like, Oh, look at us sharing. And then I think that idea of business model or impact, I was never deeply ingrained in it early days, like you rolling all MOOCs all the time. But what was that like, I think over in South Africa, because that must have been a totally different conversation.
9:11
And second set little bit about how I, what, what, where I went to after, you know, my, my master's, so in 2013, I joined the University of Cape Town. And at that time, they the senior leadership were deciding whether to join the MOOCs movement, they had been invited to buy the big platform companies. And I happened to be get attached to the team that wrote a position paper and we looked at all the different platforms and we looked at the business models, and we, in the end made a recommendation to say yes, give us some money. We want to experiment with this. We think there's some something here. We don't know whether we will make money. We're being quite frank with that, but this is an opportunity for innovation. For a university like the University of Capetown, which is a sort of residential research intensive University, but it's an opportunity for us to, you know, play in this space. And I think at that stage for the senior leadership, there was this, you know, wanting to be part of this club, or this group of universities, we're being kind of wooed. And, and so it was accepted, much to my surprise, and we were given some good funding. And I became the MOOC team, project manager. And so I ran the project at UCT, along with some colleagues, and we really started from scratch. We employed instructional designers, we set up studios, we developed production facilities. And you know, we over time have courses on Coursera and futurelearn. At the beginning, we said we wanted to do a multi platform engagement, we didn't want to quit, put all our eggs in one basket, we wanted to experiment and play. And it's been a really quite, it's considered to be quite successful in the institution, we don't make very much money. That wasn't really, I mean, that that many people thought we would, you know, like, millions and whatever. But but we didn't, we didn't really consider the business models at the beginning. But it did allow us to build in house capacity, it has allowed us to showcase, you know, global South scholarship, teaching courses from an African University on a global platform. And it helped us build in house capacity. And with all of that with, we kept researching. So we took a critical stance, we were not convinced by some of these conversations around, you know, Martin mentions around disruption. I mean, I'd really been sensitized to that having studied with Martin anyways, it was, it was and I continued that relationship anyway. But we, you know, we, I think the context in South Africa is different, our participation rate and higher education is something like 17% of eligible people, it's low. So we were interested in what can these types of courses non formal, informal offer, to groups of people who, for whatever reason, have very little access to forms of higher education, not withstanding the issues around connectivity, the digital divide. So it's been a very sort of complex considered, you know, emergent journey. And we haven't, the story's not finished yet for us either, as it is for other people. And I think maybe we might discuss later, what the COVID experience has done to to MOOCs as well, which I think might be something we'd come back to. So my engagement was then really in running a MOOC team in an institution formally partnering with platforms engaging with the kind of dealing with some of the issues then seeing how the platform's moved to micro credentials, and online degrees and the kind of engagements and interactions. And so I've been very much part of that kind of insider conversation. As well as being able to research it's I think, I've been really privileged to have been able to do that. So that that's really where in my in the South African context, but there are relatively few universities in South Africa who can afford to make MOOCs that meet the production values. And so I'm very mindful of that. And what I did find interesting, and that was touched on in Martin's chapter was how the MOOC model is being kind of repurposed in localized contexts. So not with big platforms necessarily, not with those business models. But somehow the form as it is a kind of type of online learning, which you can critique as well, has been adopted in different contexts and localized and I think that's, that's been really interesting.
14:08
So I wonder one of the in 2012, one of the other weird things that ended up happening is, I got invited with Martin actually, and Grange Canole, and George Siemens, and a bunch of Stephen Downes a bunch of other Yahoo's to go to New Delhi and have a conversation we were wholly unprepared to have about widening participation and scale, and the potential for MOOCs to actually have an impact in communities that don't have consistent internet connection. It was particularly the whole conference that we were invited to speak at, was about the potential for MOOCs and cell phones, right? So because you've got people in communities where, you know, in some cases, there's no electricity, but those people still have access to cell phones. There was this belief that somehow The MOOC model could be something that actually did widen participation for people. So openness and widen participation in that, in that Open University sense of the word open. Did you see much of that? Have you seen much of that in the last seven or eight years in South Africa? Has it been something that you think has contributed to a widening of participation?
15:18
Um, I think it's, it would be disingenuous to say that it's contributed at scale, because in South Africa, you know, online education, online learning, it's not, it was not very well recognized and very well known. And the main barriers would be connectivity, and the cost of data. So it would be I would be disingenuous to say it, it met what those early conversations were, I mean, I think, in line with the data that we know about, MOOCs, and those courses have been used by people who perhaps already have some education, and perhaps already have the capital to be able to learn. in those ways. I don't think the data and the student profile in South Africa is significantly different. However, in our research at the sort of individual level, what we have found is that students are making incredible leaps of ingenuity to study via cell phones, where they, where they have been able to, and sometimes it's because there is no other alternative. And so there are groups of students, especially in health care, or an education, teachers, healthcare workers who have been able to reuse some of the MOOC offerings. But at this stage, I think, I think over the last seven years, maybe in the last couple of years, we might see that happening. So for example, recently, in the past year, the South African government, one of the government departments, has partnered with Coursera, to offer particular courses for skills development in digital skills, for example, and I know, organizations like the Commonwealth of learning have been doing that as well. So that's where people are trying scale, and almost using the MOOC platforms as the type of courseware and then the platform affordances, in terms of, of administering the courses, but I don't think it had that sort of democratic, you know, flowering of sudden, I mean, yeah, that that I was never going to be the case in South Africa, given the inherent inequalities, rural, urban, race, you know, all of those things as inequalities, it probably exacerbated those inequalities until you do something about it, and actively do something about it. So just having MOOCs out there, and enabling access is just a very small part. And if you're serious, then it's around more targeted interventions. So wrapping MOOCs, we did some research on this, where we found that some organizations were gathering people together and facilitating MOOCs, helping people get a get together in libraries, for example, so that connectivity and devices would be available, but also a facilitator who could scaffold the teaching and learning process, for example, because, you know, you've got language issues, and you have issues around the ability to learn in the MOOC, those MOOC that MOOC, that particular type of MOOC pedagogy, which is a self actualized learner, who knows how to learn, you can manage time, and those particular types of characteristics. Where do we find those learners? Sukaina? I can't find those anywhere these days.
18:57
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, that well, they're the the ones that we talk about resilience and all of these sort of like troublesome words, I think, you know, but I will say that the the research project that we have running we take as an Africa, we are only interviewing people who've completed and that's been really, really interesting to see what it was about them that help them complete, and it seems to be intense motivation and an intense need for that, whether it's because they they are supplementing studies or supplementing courses because they need to get on or they want to move into a new field. And surprisingly, you know, these groups of learners are not particularly complaining about access and connectivity, even though we've had some incredible stories of people having to work through power cuts and, you know, have solar panels and those kinds of things. So, it's a much You know, we've we tried to move away from a deficit model of looking at low to actually see why they were doing these courses. I mean, why would they bothering and what value were they getting out of them? And then on that, then we can, we're finding that there are still structural barriers. So for example, if you've completed MOOC, you should be able to get a certificate for a reasonable price. I think that's not always the case. Some people might not have credit cards, if you convert US dollars to South African Rand, it's quite expensive. So yeah, this is a very mixed mixed story going forward.
20:35
That's kind of what in a microcosm, what was so fascinating to me about this conversation in 2012, because you have that connectivist energy that has gone started in 2008. And you have the pieces of that, that are continuing today and the research that's going on, but you have this flimsy four letter acronym that is trying to hold all things to all people together. And the New York Times is calling this the year of the MOOC, and hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital are going into places, and the the colonialist aspect of some groups of colleges saying for $250,000, you can have access to put your courses and you're still gonna have to pay to put out there so that we can send them out to learners who are going to be engaging this on a cell phone, without adequate Wi Fi without adequate ability to do the connectivist things that the MOOC was supposed to do in the first place. And so, how, for me, how were all of these pieces supposed to fit together? And I guess the the, the piece was, they weren't, there was no way it was ever going to. So this was just a promise that was made that got some hype and raised some money. And it's great that there's still research happening, it's great that there's still pieces coming out of this. Um, and I wonder did that hiccup, and I would love to get what you guys think of it? Was that boom from 2012 to 2014 2015? Was that that phenomenon, beneficial to the idea of Open Education of, you know, multimedia learning of kind of connectivism? Or was it detrimental? And secondly, I know you mentioned what this thing, how we think about this in terms of the pandemic? What are the MOOC lessons that are, that are? What are the MOOC lessons we are thinking of? Now in the way that we're designing courses online? Are they taking the best of what was going on for MOOCs? Or are they taking the worst of what was going on for MOOCs? I don't have an answer. I think it's a little bit of both. But if it trended one way, I think it would be in the wrong way.
23:03
It's funny, my 2012 self, I'm reading a blog post, I was so prolific back, then I blocked, I actually asked, Can online education and MOOCs really replace the organic interactions in a face to face classroom environment? And I think this is a question we're still asking when we've gone to remotes emergency remote teaching, online, hybrid, high flex, I don't know you name the term insert it. And I think we're at a different place in 2012. But I thought the only good thing about MOOCs is you could study online in different types of contexts, different types of learners. And I was fortunate to work with George Veletsianos and a few others for the digital learning and social media research group to study like, what other things besides finishing a MOOC, like, that's really not as interesting. I want to know why people are in it. And you said to candidates to tool up, it's up skill and work, or it's I can't access this because I'm in a fully like, I'm in Portugal in a very early mobile learning, and I can on demand, learn at my own pace. And I can get still feel like I'm in the classroom, because we've designed some really good quality online learning. So this had more interesting outcomes for research. Although I laughed and shared to the group, the MOOC research project of 2013. That conference is now like, been co opted by some other digital camera company. But the idea was to study these digital learning spaces, and understand different types of learners around the world was actually kind of a new and novel thing that made online learning and study of that pedagogy just more accessible in some ways as a researcher, Dave's like, no, I disagree with you, or
24:44
it's not that it's such conflicting opinions about this, like, maybe maybe just a little background if you guys will excuse the old guy, because I got the gray beard now and I was looking myself and I'm like, you're the old guy talking now. Like, look at you. You become that dude, for George Siemens and Stephen Downes the first so called MOOC, and there are lots of people who would say there's lots of online learning that happened before that there definitely was. But in that particular strand of that conversation, future of learning was 2007. And that was run in Moodle, at the University of Manitoba. And by George, and there were just such a rich conversation that came out of it, there was so many unexpected conversations that that led to seascape, and the first so called book in the summer of 20 22,020. For me, they were very much on the connectivism conversation. And George and Stephen, for those of you who are deep into this conversation have very specific differences in terms of how they mean that word. And this was very much a way of them arguing this out. And my participation in the first course was I played referee, basically on Fridays, and every Friday, I sat down and we had a conversation together. And I tried to keep the conversation moving, because I did a whole bunch of interview conversation stuff at the time. But for me, it was very much about web as platform. So it wasn't about trying to it wasn't emancipation, it wasn't really about widening participation. For me at the start. It was that my experience with Ed Tech Talk, which was an online educational technology webcast, was that people from all over the world came together. And my participation in that community made me know more and didn't know why exactly, I didn't exactly understand how that was so much more valuable than my master's degree. But that community participation meant something. And the problem is, is creating a community is exhausting. And the responsibility is huge. And it never goes away. And it gets worse, the longer you have it. So online, particularly so the categories harden. And in order to maintain a we people always seem to need to make it them. And then that community gets more and more insular, the longer it lives. And that's been my experience with online communities. But that first burst, that first six or 10 weeks can be amazing. And that's to me what a MOOC was, was a way to create an artificial community for six to 10 weeks for people or 33 weeks, if you're an idiot, where, you know, a group of people who really care about a project can use the web as platform, really care about a topic or project or whatever can use web as a platform, to get in voices from all over to really enrich in a conversation. So that was never going to mesh with 165,000 people doing multiple choice questions at Stanford, like it was never going to happen. And when you look at the foundations of what pewter matros, who was the guy who designed that first course what he was doing at Stanford, he is a mastery education model guy, he thinks that things are true or not true. And the process of education is giving information to people. Right. And he tried to design a platform that did that as best as possible. That sort of became the platform it for edX platform or whatever. But that is built into the model, that the teachers, the expert, and everybody else is listening to more fundamentally opposed models, my meandering community story, and mastery learning could probably not be imagined. And they live at the core of the MOOC story. So if you read the research that we did in 2010, on MOOCs, the the sort of, it's the one that people cite. So the reason why my citations are as high as they are, is because of that one piece that we did in 2010, when nobody cared about MOOCs. But if you read that, there is nothing about mastery learning in there. There's nothing about any of the things that are recognized by 99% of the population as a MOOC. So to me, they're just they're fundamentally different things. Right? And therefore, when you try to do research on them, I pity people doing research on this, because then they pull out one piece like that, and they're like, but this has nothing to do with this. Like, how are these two things called the same thing? Well, play modry. That's why I believe.
29:03
And just technically the first person because I in my dissertation, I tried to trace when the word jumped, when when MOOC went from CCK to Stanford, and the place that it was traced and Laura pappadeaux gets the most notoriety in the mainstream literature for writing the year of the MOOC in the New York Times in 2012. And I reached out to her, and she noted that she got that from George Siemens from a 2011 blog about Stanford offering a course and putting that their blog no longer exists. If you if you look it, I'll put it in the in the chat, but the blog no longer directs, but you can find it at web archive. Um, but I think, you know, it's, you had you had attempts to try and do what you which you're talking about Dave, and there's still these places that are doing that. And I, and I spent a lot of time, you know, poking at Sebastian Thrun for saying in the future, there will be 10 universities. I think, you know, everybody recognize that these bombastic comments weren't helpful. But now kind of looking back at years later, how helpful was it to kind of you know, hit the pinata on that one, because what were we doing in that space? I was brought on to work with a Coursera MOOC on some research. It didn't end up going to fruition, I'll tell you why. This group, what they had done is they had their content. And then they put people together in groups, about 25,000 people, they put people together groups to build artifacts. And so I had a meeting with people who ran the course and somebody from Coursera. And they literally had a dump of data that showed me the time people were invested watching videos. And the time people had these and how many people turned in submissions and these different places? And I said, Where's all the information on the artifacts that were built? Where are the groups that were happening at this time, those Facebook groups was the real big place where things were going on? Where's the info on the Facebook groups? Where are the blogs that were built where the teaching resources because this is this is a MOOC that was designed for people who would end up teaching later. And they didn't know what to do, they had no idea how to engage with that information. It wasn't a matter of they didn't want to it's like what you were saying they've that was just their, their schema was so far away from that. And I wonder, as we're having this conversation, we're talking a lot about the research that's going on. It's difficult for me, because it's fascinating to hear what's been done. But then, as you said, 99% of the population, this isn't what they think about when they think about a MOOC. And so what have we missed? What, what? Where were the places that we could have intervened to move the needle in a better direction? Or was that even possible? Was this just a situation that the kind of corporate manner of thinking about education was going to take something, adapt itself to it, use the best language of it, you've got these very freefloat, free flowing people who are doing these things, and then making their own image?
32:09
I was interested in what Martin was saying, I mean, just to comment, I reread the chapter. And I thought, Gosh, he is more measured than I was expecting him to be, when I remember when I first read it. And he was talking about the kind of multiple uses and I've been thinking of MOOCs and moving away from the kind of simple single story approach. And it's almost seems futile to try and like have one, one view, even if it's like one view of connectedness, MOOCs, one view of whatever the other type, what you want to call them, forgotten, no x MOOCs. And really what interested me and Martin's met gave a few examples of where courses have been used in formal teaching and courses have been used in particular areas. And it's almost as if the form and maybe I'm taking a positive view, this is inspiring different types of use. And that people can take it or leave it in terms of the platform. I mean, you can, you know, you can put your materials on, but then you do something else around it, you might, but you don't rely necessarily on the platform to give you what you want. And so it's a sort of design challenge. And one subset of courses that I've I don't know how I've got myself involved within some is where MOOCs have been used as a form of research dissemination, or example, that when we've had a few of these come more weight at the University of Cape Town. In fact, I taught a MOOC myself with a group on the unbundled University on the futurelearn platform, which was a research dissemination MOOC for two weeks, where we wanted to talk about the future of higher education has become bundled. What is the role of marketization and we offered it as a MOOC. We didn't have to, we could have done a conference, we could have spent the money on other things. But we chose to do a MOOC. And so there's a particular function for that, you know, it becomes something else. And I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying that it's just been really interesting to see the different ways that people have taken the food. And I'm just what you were saying, Dave, about the kind of pedagogy. I mean, I have noticed that I've worked quite intensively on the Coursera and futurelearn platforms, that is the British platform owned, partly owned by the Open University. And the level of engagement we get on the for our courses on that platform in terms of discussion is very different from the level of engagement on Coursera for example, because there is a sort of indulge in the tip pedagogical invitation in the kind of mastery learning which and it's really, really interesting how different it is and it Might not be in some of the courses, right and might not be the kind of radical connectivist sort of community. And I really like the way you said that you bring together a community for a while, maybe not 13 weeks, but six weeks. But the level of discussions and the conversations and even MOOC that I, I taught was just amazed at the depth of conversation, because the end, the purpose of it was just a discussion. And and yes, it was not people didn't write blogs and so on. But it was it met its use case, I suppose. And I think maybe people are thinking like that, and looking at, like how they might use the platforms for different use cases, rather than as is intended by the platforms? Or is that almost a sort of subversive approach? In some ways?
35:54
This sounds similar to a future conversation we'll have on between the chapters goes, the conversation that people hear next week around textbooks, like, well, you were thinking about a platform for thinking about space, digital space is gonna save us. And I really like that you've touched on like, the richness of what community building is. So it could be a community of inquiry that we know or community of practice, is really what some of those early MOOCs are. Let's define a couple things as I've listeners that are like, What's an X MOOC, an X MOOC is created by a producer. How would you define it?
36:27
So I think my understanding is that as opposed to the C MOOC, which was the sort of original connectivist MOOCs around community, the x MOOC is a kind of mastery approach, where you are feeding content offering content and quizzes, and it's, it's self paced. And those were the early definitions that people used to distinguish I found I don't find them particularly useful anymore, either from a research purpose or when you're talking to people who are thinking about creating courses. But I think they had to sort of early use as a kind of distinguisher. Between perhaps the kind of philosophical underpinnings of why you might actually want to offer large scale online courses.
37:13
I think this speaks back to answer Rolin's question from earlier in terms of what we could have done. I think what happened is the community of people who are responsible for answering these questions so that the ad tech community if such a thing exists, really kind of turned on itself in 2012. So a whole bunch of people made that distinction, the C MOOC x MOOCs distinction, in attempt to try to preserve the purity of the original MOOCs, as opposed to saying, Hey, here's this thing that's happening. Let's work with it. It was no, no, no, those are those things. You can see that in the blog post you're talking about from George C MOOC, an X MOOCs distinction, as far as I'm concerned, Stephen Downes at least popularized that if didn't come up with it, but it's really about keeping the purity of the thing that they were doing, as if it was pure in the first place. And the second piece was there were a whole bunch of people turn against MOOCs, generally, because they were popular, which seems like such a ridiculous reason to hate something, when suddenly we had this chance to make, I think, some really good I think it may be it behind closed doors, and the more of this stuff happened, but publicly, it really became, that's not what we do. Right. And so a lot of the sort of bigger voices in our community very much as opposed to saying, here's this thing that's happening, let's see, we can do to shepherd it. They said, here's this thing that's happening. And that's totally not what we do. So that thing is about thing. And so I think there were a lot of missed opportunities to give good sound guidance at that time. And certainly I've learned from that experience because of that. And there
38:50
were it's it's difficult, because I agree with with Dave that, like, some of the things that happened really were to differentiate and I define x MOOC as a pejorative only used by people who believe in C MOOCs to sanctify what they've done. Because if you ask 99% of people, and what's the difference between an x and a C MOOC, they'll, today, they'll be like, well, what's up Luke in the first place, but there were a lot of problems that came forward, you had the whole debacle at San Jose State University, where Udacity was brought in to save remedial education, and just didn't have the skills or competencies or anything in order to be able to do that. And so there were problems that came up that Ed Tech, whether that's a thing or not saw and was shouting about but didn't get the you know, didn't have the the playing field, they didn't have the understanding of where that space went. You know, it's unfortunate that the expertise wasn't taken to those places. But I guess my fear is we're continuing especially now in this kind of pandemic and post pandemic phase of learning. We're starting to repeat those problems that we had with the original nuclear We've learned from Luke says we can now make really bad slide presentations, to force onto people and call it education. And that's so counterintuitive to what this whole conversation and what we've been talking about, like, it's really heartwarming that our conversation about MOOCs has been largely positive today, Who would have guessed that in 2014? You know, and I think it says something to Martin, that in his chapter, he doesn't punch down, that he tries to be as balanced about this as possible. So like, you know, with some, with some hindsight, you know, we're able to see some different things, but then are we really learning from where those problems came? Because the problem was, it was a Hydra that had all sorts of different places. And so if you focused on, you know, the the learning that was going on in the modalities, you weren't thinking about the marketing problems that were going on there, you weren't thinking about the issues of colonialization, that were happening. You weren't thinking about what that did for education. from a financial perspective. If you focus on one of those, you weren't thinking about the other pieces. I mentioned earlier. Yeah, it was kind of when we, the 2012 was when we stopped having nice things. But there is some truth to that, because that was this dawning for mass media of what, how they could be experts in education. And we didn't get experts, we got people who played them on TV, people never kind of, you know, faked until they made it. They're just still faking it.
41:25
So I want to make a really specific example for how that's playing out right now. So if you look at the ification of the university system right now, which I think is probably other than student engagement, the thing I've heard the most about in the last 10 months, what's happened is we're trying to hold on to our previous educational model, the same way that those MOOCs, we're trying to hold on to a previous educational model, ie 10 years ago, try to hold on to our dominant power position. The whole idea of web as platform of the MOOC, or whatever else is originally conceived, is that everything's out there anyway. Why don't we take advantage of that, instead of trying to lock it down? Chegg is only so Chegg is a online Collaboratory, assignment creation platform, otherwise known as a place where students go to cheat and get their answers to their questions.
42:10
There's a lot of air quotes in that description. There's not
42:12
one on there. So Chegg only works, if we withhold the answers from students, if we withhold the existing abundance of the internet away from the students and say, Don't look at the answers. We're gonna give you these questions I made total sense 50 years ago, right? Same problem we tried to make with MOOCs, we did not learn from the fact that openness is not an art, it's not a choice. Right? The availability of the information on the internet is not a choice, it is a problem that we need to address, we are not going to ever address that problem by locking it down. That doesn't solve the problem, right? All it does is create scenarios in which students have to find another way around. And then we send them underground, instead of saying, Oh, you live in a world where you have too much information, and we're going to tell you how to handle it. We say let's imagine this world of artificial scarcity, where it's still 1975. And I can lock all these answers away from you. Same thing we tried to do in 2012. Same thing so many people are trying to do in 2021, when they're confronting this new reality of the abundance of the internet.
43:14
I like that. I think we frame things as positive for some people in this conversation are quite jaded. Normally. I'm wondering, I loan this. I own my own jadedness. So it's not just you, Dave. I was wondering, though, like, what are we going to take from if I know that Martin didn't intend this book to come out during a pandemic, but there are lessons that we can learn that are similar to the MOOC story? Because there was a good question he posed, he said, what have we learned after? I think, after all, the fury died down. After 2012? We started learning more interesting things actually, related to MOOCs. Well, what will we learn this year? Or maybe what questions do we need to ask ourselves, the community of teaching, learning edtech and openness that we could apply to where we're at in the pandemic?
44:00
One of the things and I don't know whether Martin says it in the book, but I it's quite memorable. I remember asking, inviting Martin to speak to us about online education and MOOCs. I think it must have been 2014 2015. And he gave a seminar and there was one particular slide where he contrasted like MOOCs, and, you know, online learning, and he talked about the cream bar, and he'll know what I mean, which is the level of support that you need to give students and that kind of, effectively what we're talking about is teaching. And I think that is something that kind of comes and goes and we find different ways of saying how we're going to teach online but that's really stayed with me around the need to continue to focus on how we are going to teach and support students bottom line which is, cannot and that's for me is the difference between an advocate the research genomics, the students who are competing are ones who can, for whatever reason. But there are many, many more students who will need proper support proper psychosocial support, not only academic support, and then especially I think what we've learned to our university is in the pandemic times where people have gone remote students are studying in all kinds of home unequal home circumstances, that it's that level of care and support, that is not scalable, necessarily, um, no matter how much you try and do that. And I think that I mean, that's an issue. It's a conundrum. It's a problem. But it's also a way of distinguishing, I think, between the kinds of online learning that we might want to work on and promote and use what we've learned in MOOCs and MOOC like environments and all these kind of other, you know, MOOC models that have come about, but I remember very clearly back then, Martin talking about this sort of the cost of a course is actually, it's not the content, and the contents already there. every way, you know, whether you create it yourself, but it's the teaching and the support, and that I don't think can be checked quite easily. nor would we want.
46:21
I think one of the things that the only place that I take issue with Martin, anywhere in the history of Martin Weller is, there wasn't a chapter on gamification. Um, because this focus on you know, using gaming, versus what game means versus game in the sense of manipulating a system for your benefit. That's where the Chegg-ification of education comes into. We've created this gamification is education in many ways, because we are giving out certificate a credential, you know a letter, and we are trying to work into that space. And if you can't scale human interaction, then you are creating a system to be gamed. One of the things that continues to come up every year, every two years as somebody saying, how do we have bots, great writing? What's the point of writing something if unless you're writing it for a robot, if you're actually writing something very human, then a human needs to engage with it? So my hope on these things is we can if we realize what we want, if we want people to engage, why can't we develop LTI alongside our learning management systems, that basically do what fortnight and before that Call of Duty and before that Warcraft did, and, you know, put put a raid team together to focus on the Google Doc around a specific project, you know what, that technology should be so ubiquitous? If it's too expensive, then we just need to say it. And then we need to say what education is truly about. If it's about a credentialing service, if that's not what it is, we're trying to connect people from around the globe, then we need to spend the money to do that. But the problem there is MOOCs become a cost albatross and not a loss, they could be going a loss leader rather than a revenue generator.
47:59
I think the thing that 2012 that one of the positive outcomes that came out of there is that people started asking themselves what education was, you know, and I think the same thing is happening right now. And I think if I stood to match those two things up against each other, I think the 2012 think did give us some practice. to sort of go, oh, should we be firing presidents? Because they're not setting up MOOC platforms? Or y'all remember that one, University of Virginia? Or, you know, we'll wait a minute, if we can just record us talking. And we can automate all the multiple choice questions.
48:33
What are we doing here?
48:35
You know, and those conversations were happening in 2012, in a way that did not happen to me in 2008, or nine or 10. And so right now, in the last 1011 months, I've had more conversations with people who are suddenly interested in student engagement. I can talk about student engagement now in a way where people actually don't fall asleep. Now, maybe I've gotten suddenly better. But I don't think that's the thing. I think also now that thing of what the value add to the university experiences, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's happened, that also has come up from an administrative standpoint, where suddenly for local community universities, for instance, their business model is hugely, hugely threatened by this whole process, because suddenly, I can stay in the city of Windsor and not go to the University of Windsor. Right, so that piece of how the web affects the bottom line is a gateway into us talking about engagement in a way that in 2012, what are you as a faculty member, if you can just be recorded became a gateway into, hey, what if your classes were interesting for your students? And so I think that we can learn, we can do the same kinds of things. Now we're doing 2012 1314 which is getting access to conversations that people like me more normally into, and provide that hey, you know what students are people Which the end of the day was the message I had in 2012. And it's a message I'm giving in 2021. There are humans who are bored when you bore them and interested when you interest them. And that's really the difference. Right?
50:14
Yeah, I'd like a Martin ended the chapter, which is he's so prolific and he didn't know he's writing this for the pandemic. But he said, it really raised. MOOCs really raise the profile of open education, maybe digital learning, and all these things that we just never really figured out for teaching pedagogical practice, what that means to have resources, they are, quote, unquote, free, because the work comes in the labor comes from somewhere. But these are all factors and issues that are, quote, are still playing out. And this is happening now as we question. I wonder what kind of questions you have for Martin about this chapter. Or maybe in the community that's listening. They might be an edtech. That could be open Ed, or they could be just people are like, I just think Dave Cormier is great. And I'm listening to this episode. Like, what kind of just kidding? Don't I don't want to raise your ego in that one? What kind of questions do you want to ask and pose? Maybe from things we're learning now? Or Martin, about MOOCs? Or what we thought MOOCs were at the time?
51:13
I found it really interesting. And that he mentioned the role of educational technologists at the end of this chapter and the influence they could have. And if I had read that, when it came out, you know, before the pandemic, I might have said, you know, that's like, being a bit optimistic. But given what's happened in the last year, and you know, the role of units like mine, which is your statistical learning center, with educational technology, and the conversations that I've been drawn in, and as a result, and colleagues, and you know, certainly instructional designers are, you know, the sort of valuable people around to get people through, but I would ask him about, like, how do you sustain that? How do you institution and continue to influence? And and have those conversations? Because my concern is that once you know, we get vaccinated and the pandemic dies down, you know, are we going to go back? Or not? We who is the we? That's another question. But, you know, I suspect that many, many academics, many teachers, faculty will just be so relieved. And so you know, what, what are the leavers that we might have if our goal is to promote better student, you know, student learning, effectively in whatever mode? You know, we're in sort of online, blended hybrid, high flex all of these other things. So that was what interested me that he wrote that then. But it seems very relevant now.
52:55
Yeah, I think, for me, what I'd really be interested in, I'd want to dial him down on defining what he thinks a MOOC is, in the space, because obviously, coming from the Open University, and the work that was happening there, congruent to the stuff coming out of Canada, at the time, in there are the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century. What does MOOC mean, then? What did MOOC mean, then? What does move mean? Now? One of the things he noticed that it could be equally beneficial and detrimental? And for the detrimental? Are there things that we can do as a community of educators? We're going to talk about edtech, because kind of now everybody's involved in edtech, to some extent, how do we broaden that idea of edtech, to bring into practices that are at the forefront of this book that are the forefront of the conversation we've been talking about here?
53:50
I mean, Martin started out in MOOCs, right in the 1990s. That was, you know, the 15,000 person courses that he was designing and running his whole start, right. I guess for me with Martin in his sort of, I have four chairs of blah, blah, blah, and his status and his position and stuff. The thing I would ask him is what advice he has for people who are trying to explain this to other people. Like, how is he handling this administratively, because I think in the next, even going forward in the next year, a whole bunch of people who are reading his book, which again, he did not know, there's gonna be a pandemic. And a lot of people who are going to be well, the couple people who end up listening to this podcast will be in that point where they'll have five minutes to explain to somebody what's going on. And I wonder, given how many times he's likely been in that situation in the last five or 10 years and certainly in the last 10 months. What does that person do with that five minutes trying to explain all this business? Right? Like if they have is it give one lesson that has been learned that starts from here or what? Like, what's that piece that can help that person do a good job in that Three minutes, that they might have to make the difference in the course of their organization. No pressure.
55:06
My last question, actually, the key is I'm gonna put this community because I don't think Mark can answer this one, I think, what does access mean for some of these ways that we teach, learn? And even scaffold research that I've heard from these examples is, what does it mean to really be truly accessible in our global economy and world? Because I'm trying to think about the modes in which we learn and are there lessons we can take from this, I guess, experiments, expertise and background, because we're gonna have to think about the way we go forward. And it's not going to be anything and I don't use the word normal. I want us to think about intentionality. So what ways can we be intentional about thinking about access and access points to learning that maybe we didn't learn from 2012. And we can go back to reflect. So Martin, that was on you, that's on the community. But I do want to thank all of you for actually posing some really interesting questions and things that I'm going to continue to think about. So thanks for joining me for this episode and having a conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. I like when Dave's on mute. Ah,
56:09
everybody likes it better when I'm on mute.
56:13
You've been listening to
56:14
between the chapters with your host Laura Pasquini. For more information for to subscribe to between the chapters and 25 years of edtech visit 25 years dot open ed.ca