Tag: learning design

More wrong than right with MOOCing so far…

Sue Watling / / social impact of the Internet, Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)


At first it’s difficult to tell if EPIC 2020 is a promotion of MOOCs or a warning. Ultimately it may be both.  The message is represent a one way direction with irreversible impact on higher education as we know it.  EPIC (Evolving Personal Information Construct) 2020 offers a vision of a future where academia is no longer the gatekeeper of knowledge, tuition obsolete and degrees irrelevant. The reason is the MOOC.  The shift has already begun with MOOC giants Udacity, Khan Academy, Coursera, MITX and TedEd supported by Mozilla Open Badges as alternatives to accreditation.

Like conspiracy theories the video offers a powerful argument but via a limited view of educational transformation, one which only sells a single side of the story. Bill Sams is behind EPIC 2020 and Tipping Point 2012 its partner video. Sams is a Commissioner on the eTech Ohio Commission and an Executive in Residence at Ohio University. He operates a locked down Twitter account but has publicly commented on the online universities blog saying ‘My objective in producing EPIC was to create a piece that would cause people to consider and discuss that there are dramatic alternatives to the traditional education system’

‘Traditional’ education is continually facing alternatives; not least digital technologies and affordances. The move to Open Educational Resources (OER) through the open education movement is one such inevitable product of the internet. The rationale for OER is strong; in particular enabling students to make appropriate choices of HEI as well as supporting the widening participation and life long learning agendas.  MOOCs have been tried but are less tested.

I’ve been engaging in MOOC behaviours for a few months; initially thinking it was a bubble ready to burst but also watching the increase in MOOC collaborations become media headlines. Currently on Week 4 of OLDsMOOC, I’m confident (at the present time) there is more wrong with MOOCs than right. They are massive, open and online but with no ‘one size fits all model’ they can only suit some types of learning and student preferences better than others.

What MOOCs are good at is stimulating debate around the wider issues of learning design and the role of higher education in the 21st century. It’s time to be more critical about MOOCs, and some of the possible drivers behind the MOOCing phenomena. EPIC 2020 and Tipping Point 2012 offer useful places for these debates to begin.

 

OLDsMOOC Week 3: ‘Not waving but drowning’ by Stevie Smith

Sue Watling / / Teaching and Learning in a Digital Age (TELEDA)

Still immersed in a sea of information and in mind of the Stevie Smith poem ‘Not waving but drowning’

Reflecting on the references to Learning Design omitting the prefix integral to course name i.e. Online Learning Design, has been interesting. Initially I thought this risked diluting the ‘Online’ specific requirements of Learning Design such as attention to the diversity of ways people use computers and access the internet (from mobile devices through to assistive technologies) and the associated need for inclusive practice such as providing alternate formats and ensuring users can customise content to suit their own preferences, but it turns out I may have misunderstood the concept of OLDsMOOC .

The Week 3 focus on tools and toolboxes suggests OLDsMOOC is more about the ways online environments support the development of generic Learning Design than how to customise Learning Design for Online environments. I hadn’t seen it this way. Which demonstrates aptly how learners bring their own ways of seeing and being to the learning experience and potentially affecting interaction. If I’ve misinterpreted the focus of OLDsMOOC I’ve learned experientially about the inevitable space between the production of online learning and the experience of the consumer. this suggests even if I stop waving and disappear totally under the surface of clouds, groups and a mass of other digital tools, it will have been worth while!