Serendipity35

Part of the appeal of being a university that offers MOOCs through providers like Coursera is that it puts you in very nice academic company since the courses are offered by many of the elite world institutions. Recently, Coursera added ten new state university systems with multiple colleges to their network.

As pointed out on moocnewsandreviews.com, in partnering with so many institutions, Coursera sidesteps a contractual obligation to primarily offer courses from members of the Association of American Universities (AAU) or “top five” universities in countries outside of North America.

Coursera will be branding a new section of its offerings website for these state universities. Some of those state universities might see this as creating a second tier of offerings which put their schools in a less prominent, perhaps second class, light.

Inside Higher Ed reported that SUNY's associate provost, Carey Hatch, "...said SUNY, which has two AAU institutions (Stony Brook University and University at Buffalo), was not quite thrilled with the segregation. 'We’re not totally happy about it, but we understand the perspective of where Coursera partners started from,' he said. 'We hope through the course of time where they end will be something different.'  The University of Colorado system is glad it can offer more MOOCs from all its campuses on Coursera. Its Boulder campus is an AAU institution and existing Coursera partner, but its three other campuses are not." 

The State University of New York (SUNY) has 64 campuses, which makes it one of the largest systems in the world. They are already making an effort to enroll 100,000 new students over the next several years as part of their own Open SUNY initiative.

When I was the Manager of Instructional Technology at NJIT, I asked my staff to emphasize the "instructional" prt of our name. We were IT, but not the information technology folks who had very different concerns. My department was housed under an umbrella with media services. Before I arrived, instructional technology was the smallest group and the campus community often saw all of us as one big tech group. I wanted the emphasis to be on how to instruct using technology rather than how to jam technology into instruction. We joked so often about having solutions to problems that didn't exist that the IT people were sometimes the first to say it before introducing a new technology to us.

Of course, we were not anti-tech or anti-IT at all. We led the emerging technology group and sought out new instructional technologies all the time. I was introduced to EDUCAUSE in 2001 and I admit that at first I saw it as a very information technology organization without enough concern for instruction for my purposes. They still are closer to that IT side, but over the years I have seen the two IT groups - information and instructional - move closer to the center of that Venn diagram.

Every year, EDUCAUSE puts out a top issues report and I always viewed it as one way to think about what we might address in the new academic year come September.

Here are their Top Ten IT Issues for 2013:

Leveraging the wireless and device explosion on campus
Improving student outcomes through an approach that leverages technology
Developing an institution-wide cloud strategy to help the institution select the right sourcing and solution strategies
Developing a staffing and organizational model to accommodate the changing IT environment and facilitate openness and agility
Facilitating a better understanding of information security and finding appropriate balance between infrastructure openness and security
Funding information technology strategically
Determining the role of online learning and developing a sustainable strategy for that role
Supporting the trends toward IT consumerization and bring-your-own device
Transforming the institution's business with information technology
Using analytics to support critical institutional outcomes

You can read more about each in the latest issue of EDUCAUSE Review or online, but I was actually more interested to see a section on "New Strategic Priorities."  Noting that "The boundaries between academia and the rest of the world have never been more porous," they chose four priorities in particular. 

1) Contain and reduce costs. The bleak economic outlook and reduced funding sources are making it imperative to reduce or at the very least contain the growth of costs. Efficiencies are sought, and business best practices are often viewed as the best path to achieving efficiencies.

This first one interests me (from the instructional side of the house) the least, although I know it may be the number one concern on a campus.

But I am interested in the three other priorities, all of which would be on my list of things we need to be addressing in the new academic year.

2) Achieve demonstrable improvements in student outcomes. The practice of measuring, improving, and reporting student outcomes is moving from highly desirable to imperative. The window of opportunity for colleges and universities to shape how they define, measure, and improve student outcomes—rather than react to external requirements—is shrinking.

3) Keep pace with innovations in e-learning, and use e-learning as a competitive advantage.3 Whether driven by the explosive interest in open educational resources (OERs), most notably Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or by explorations in using technology to develop and implement new academic credentialing models like badging and competencies, presidents, chancellors, and provosts are eager to use technology to help inform and transform postsecondary education.

4) Meet students' and faculty members' expectations of contemporary consumer technologies and communications. Students and faculty not only expect that they will be able to use their smartphones, tablets, and consumer-based apps in their academic work but also expect that their institutions' services will work as elegantly and effectively as commercial services.

The article offers that higher education institutions have been building systems for years that gather, process, and report institutional data, but that is is usually siloed into finance, human resources, facilities, research activities, and student performance. Even with all these siloes, the university itself probably is another larger silo (towring, and made of ivory?) that doesn't connect with other universities data, systems, processes, or services.

And that is a shame, because so many of our strategic priorities have become the same that we need the instructional side and the information side to work together, and to work with other institutions.

At the recent OCW Consortium meeting in Bali, Indonesia, awards were given in two categories of open courses – text-based and multimedia.

Text based courses include written materials for the course, including lecture notes, assessments, syllabi, calendars and readings.

Multimedia courses also include video, audio or other type of multimedia presentation of materials.

These courses are produced in a variety of languages and developed by institutions committed to increasing access to high quality higher education for everyone.

America certainly does not dominate the winners.

2013 Course winners – text based courses:

·       An American Constitutional History Course for Non American Students, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
·       Delft Design Guide, Delft University of Technology
·       Atomic Physics, African Virtual University
·       Fisiología Humana, Universidad de Cantabria
·       Conocimientos Básicos de Matemáticas para Primeros Cursos Universitarios, Universidad de Zaragoza

2013 Course winners – multimedia courses:

·       Thermal and Statistical Physics, National Tsing Hua University Opencourseware
·       Productos de apoyo y tecnologías de la información y las telecomunicaciones, UNED: Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
·       Basic Arithmetic, Scottsdale Community College
·       Developmental Math, The NROC Project
·       Introduction to Aerospace Engineering I, Delft University of Technology

A discussion developed late in my "Academia and the MOOC" course about completion rates and "lurkers." The term lurker has been used for quite awhile online. At first, they were people who went into discussions and chat rooms and just read/watched without participating. The term had a negative connotation.

The term carried over to online courses. Of course, in a class online with 25 students, anyone who does not participate is readily apparent. All the major LMS allow you to track student usage. In fact, it's easier to monitor student participation online via the software than it is to monitor in a large face to face classroom. 

In my own online courses, I will nudge lurkers. But in a MOOC with thousands of students, that may not be possible. I commented in my MOOC that at least 20% of registrants did not view any content. The LMS didn't allow for me to get percentages for discussion participation for the class as a whole (only for individuals) but I could see that at least half of the other participants only participated in one of the four modules.

I suspected that some of those who used module one and then dropped out (or lurked) had decided the course was not for them. Now, I am having second thoughts about that.

As the discussion on this topic continued (and it has continued beyond the course in other places) and based on some 1:1 messages with participants, I realized that what I saw as lurking may be better described as auditing.

Module one was on the history of MOOCs and two participants told me that they were really only interested in reading that content. Although they may have looked at some of the other materials and posts, they entered the course to find out how MOOCs developed. They found what they wanted, and they left.

So, are they lurkers? I would say the term does not apply.

I had divided the second module into the roles of the stakeholders in academia that MOOCs affect - designer, teacher, administrator, support staff and student. I had contact with several people who told me that they were most interested in seeing what was posted about their role and participating in that discussion and less intersted in the other roles. I had hoped that people would enter all the discussions about the interrelated roles, but that may have been an unreasonable discussion on my part.

Again, someone who took the course to find out more about the instructional designer's role in MOOCs may have looked at some history and looked at case studies from different colleges that touched on the designer role, but may nt have had the time or interest in the other sections.

It has been suggested that MOOCs might function more as a textbook online (content repository) that includes a way to engage with the author (teacher/designer) and with others who are interested in the topic. Since Canvas allows my course to remind online and accessible to the students who registered, it is possible for people to go in after the four week live run of the class and still read discussions (no posting allowed) that they didn't get around to reading, and view the rest of the content.

So why not leave the course open for new registrations perpetually? Obviously, anyone jumping in now would be met with hundreds aof unread posts and no chance to post themselves and expect a response from the original poster who is likely to be done with the course. But there are MOOC providers experimenting with this idea and by having new start dates on a rolling basis, you could allow new groups of participants to use the material again and again with fresh discussions. Would it be necessary to have a facilitator in the course to keep things moving and revise the content? That is probably needed. My "course" was not typical in that it did not have assignments or grades, so anyone not posting in discussions was lurking/auditing. It wasn't designed as a MOOCourse, but intended to be a MOOConversation, so not participating in the conversation would be, to me, a kind of failure. That may not be true for participants.

I came across a presentation on "Learning Theories for the Digital Age" by Steve Wheeler (see below) that contained these two slides. He suggests that lurking may be considered "legitimate peripheral participation."

Where would we place the course auditor/lurker in his "architecture of participation?"





One of the participants in my course, Ann Priestly, has posted some thoughts on this topic on her own blog. She takes issue with my comment that “being engaged in any online course of any size means being involved in the discussions. It’s like web 1.0 and web 2.0 – read only and read/write.”

She is of the belief that there are many types of engagement including reading, reflecting and creating one’s own knowledge. She may be right. I am certainly coming from having taught for decades face to face and for more than ten years online in traditional credit bearing courses with always less than 25 students - and that just may not apply in the MOOC world.  I certainly have become "engaged" with books I am reading where there is no interaction between the content and myself or with other readers or the author. Was I lurking? 

Ann included a link to another post on this issue of lurking that suggest these people might be called "listeners." Still, as MOOCs become more accepted as legitimate courses for credit or advancement, the issue of what level of engagement will be required to complete a course successfully will become more important.

For now, my conclusion is that we need to rethink the reasons that people enroll in MOOCs and consider that lurkers have a legitimate reason for being there, and we might want to take that person into consideration in the course design.

I wish now that I had a required survey for students to register that included more information about what they wanted from the course and what their intention was in registering. (Typically, I see the question of how many hours do you plan to give to the course, which isn't really a helpful number to me.) If 30% of registrants were there because of a particular content area or just to "experience a MOOC," that would change your completion numbers from the start.

Learning Theories for the Digital Age from Steve Wheeler