Confessions of a MOOC Dilettante

I am one who loves to learn - but I lack discipline.  Not a good combination.  It's not that I am lazy, I am one of the busiest people I know. The problem is, I just can't help jumping into MOOC's and trying to learn something new.  I go from MOOC to MOOC without finishing the course completely.  I know it is terrible.  My relationship to MOOC's is like a kid in a candy store, I just can't get enough.

While MOOC's haven't broken into the cranberry market yet, we hear a lot about MOOC's and 'Disruptive Innovation', ' Disruptive Education' or 'Disruptive anything' for that matter.  While there is a lot of controversy over MOOC's and 'Disruptive Education' all of us are waiting for part two in regards to MOOC's and higher education.

Attack of the MOOC's - Part Deux

With MOOC's enrolling absurd amounts of people, what kind of feedback does the instructor really have the time to give to the average learner? In my experience with online education (in the Higher Ed. arena and the private market) it is very difficult to give meaningful feedback no matter how automated it is.  Indeed, according to Laura Pappano of the NY Times:

"Because anyone with an Internet connection can enroll, faculty can’t possibly respond to students individually. So the course design — how material is presented and the interactivity — counts for a lot. As do fellow students. Classmates may lean on one another in study groups organized in their towns, in online forums or, the prickly part, for grading work"

Attack of the MOOC's

The dependency of student to student interaction versus instructor to student is absolutely necessary for MOOC's to work - as long as they have such high enrollment.  But does this stifle or promote learning?  If there is no confirmation of being on the right track from the professor or some higher authority, how do we know?  This may not be a big deal to current MOOC players like myself who have their terminal degrees.  But it should  be critical for the intended audience (those in 3rd world countries) who may not have their terminal degrees.

While I believe that swarm or collective intelligence is fascinating and surprisingly correct most the time, I still want validation from an instructor.

It's Still about the Sage on the Stage

Is the "Sage on the Stage" model really over?  Even American Public Media has a few episodes revealing that lectures really aren't that effective ( see Don't Lecture Me).  While I agree in many aspects with the 'Don't Lecture Me' series, I believe that one of the big draws to MOOC education is the lecturer who does a stellar presentation.  A good lecture improves a MOOC's desirability and likewise, it could also be part of its downfall.

Case in point: Coursera Vs. Yale.  Through my MOOC jumping experience, I was able to get a taste of some of the instructors and the interfaces used in these online courses.  I like the technology that Udacity, Coursera, and edX have.  They are intuitive and I love the interactive video + self check quizzes that Udacity employs.  But I have to take my hat off to Yale's econ 159: Game Theory course with Ben Polack. I just couldn't stop watching. When it comes down to it, the 'Sage on the Stage' still holds a lot of weight with me and I think that it will be a major factor for success in the MOOC genre.


That being said, has technology really changed the popular one to many teacher to pupil relationship?  I don't think so.  Jump into any MOOC and you still see a lecture.  Oh yes, there is the added forum and chat-rooms etc. - that is true and is what differentiates a MOOC course from your typical correspondence course.  But the 'Sage on the Stage' isn't going away.

4th Annual Quality Matters (QM) Conference on Quality Assurance in Online Learning Program

On October 3-6, I was lucky enough to have the chance to attend the 4th Annual Quality Matters (QM) Conference on Quality Assurance in Online Learning Program in Tucson, AZ. Held at the wonderful Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, the conference was a mix of hundreds of instructional designers, curriculum developers, and program administrators who all came together with a common goal to promote and improve the quality of online education and student learning.

Started by MarylandOnline, Inc., the Quality Matters Program is a three-part peer review certification process consisting of a set of quality assurance standards to be met by online and blended courses. Its three parts are comprised of the QM Rubric, the Peer Review Process, and QM Professional Development. K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and community and technical colleges are encouraged to subscribe to the program to assure quality and continuous improvement in their online education offerings. West Virginia University has been a QM subscriber since February 2012.

There were many sessions running concurrently during the conference, and I was able to participate in about ten of them with topics such as exploring the collaborative relationship between designer and subject matter experts (SMEs), designing a course template based on QM principles, incorporating universal design for learning into course creation, and examining the arrival of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and their potential for QM standard integration. There were also a variety of vendors in attendance with displays exhibiting an array of educational support services.

My trip was not only highly informative but also extremely relevant to my position as instructional designer. I found that many of the sessions were focused on finding solutions to the kinds of tasks I may be challenged with on a daily basis. I hope that everyone involved in producing online courses is someday able to attend this type of conference, as it was an enriching and rewarding opportunity to be among so many peers who share the same commitment to quality online courses.

Digital Handwriting

In the office, where I work, we have had several international graduate students. One of them had a story about when she first arrived; she had met with a group of other international students, a community meant to support each other in transitioning to a new culture. She wrote each of them a handwritten note after the meeting, thanking them and inviting them to keep touch and do more, but didn't get a reply.

At a later meeting, filled with the sort of positive camaraderie that made her curious at the lack of response to her note, she asked one of her more friendly acquaintances why he had never replied. The response? He couldn't read cursive handwriting. It turned out that almost no one in the group, international or local, could reliably read cursive.

To my knowledge, we haven't stopped teaching cursive - yet. But there's a certain atrophy that has developed from being accustomed to type-written words.

So I was intrigued by a question posed on The Fox Is Black design blog: "Would it be different to get an email from someone if it was in their own handwriting?"

One of the chief recurring complaints about the "digital world" is how cold and impersonal it can seem. Would it be any different if you used a font of your own handwriting? While there are numerous font creation services out there, one design group has taken this a step further. The group, Underware, developed a custom font for a client that has extensive glyph options depending on where a letter appears - just as someone actually writing would use a different "y" in the middle of a word than would be used at the end of a word.

This whole area is ripe for discussion, but let's focus first on questions suggested by The Fox Is Black website: Would email be different if written in the sender's own handwriting? Extending this question: How would it be different? Would it feel more personal? Would the age-range of the recipient make a difference?

Another angle: Are there any educational benefits to using cursive if it's accomplished by the computer? I can see an argument for a kinesthetic connection if one were actually writing (and we could assume that one must still learn to do this in order to construct one's individual font...), but when we're constructing a font to fit our writing it loses the rigor of an exercise where one writes material down to recall it better. Do the loops and whorls of someone else's (say, a professor's) handwriting serve as any sort of memory aid for you?

Technology will only become more sophisticated, and we already have at least one "intelligent" cursive type-face. This was done primarily as a design artifact, but it certainly could be more. Is this the sort of humanizing touch our digital lives need, or are we needlessly holding on to an obsolete artifact of the past?