Serendipity35

It makes an interesting test case. Though the "course" (not really) had interdisciplinary objectives, it sounds like it could be fun for the viewer who wants to get more into it.



It was called "Society, Science, Survival: Lessons from AMC’s 'The Walking Dead.'" It was free - as a MOOC should be - and it ran for 8 weeks. It was offered on Instructure’s Canvas Network MOOC platform (I taught a MOOC there last year.) The teachers/facilitators were four UC Irvine professors from different disciplines: Zuzana Bic, public health; Joanne Christopherson, social sciences; Michael Dennin physics; and Sarah Eichhorn, mathematics.

Their goal was to use the show as a way to do case studies related to concepts from post-disaster nutrition, the foundations of human survival and stereotypes in a Darwinian environment. Sounds like a course.

Now that it has ended, I have seen a few stories online that focused on the fact that just 2,203 of the 65,000 people who enrolled in the course completed it. Completion horror stories have, unfortunately, become the big story in MOOCs the past six months. The folks at UC Irvine say the low completion rate doesn't bother them. They did get 80% of participants to spend at least an hour working on the class.



Actually, the course was designed to allow students to drop in and out of the modules. I did the same with my course. If you passed a quiz at the end of a lesson, students would earn a badge and getting all eight badges meant a certificate of completion.

 

But the story here might be more about the idea of seeing whether or not offering a "pop culture" course would attract a new audience or mean greater engagement and completion. Their completion rate is less than the usual 10-15% that is usually attached to MOOCs - and no one is happy with those numbers in academia.



90% of the students said they had never taken a MOOC before. (They got survey responses from 12,000 participants.) It might be more significant that 59% had never tried an online class at all.



I am sure you could get even more engagement and "completion" if you dropped some of the school elements of a course, increased the pop culture elements ("Let's learn about the actors and watch clips!") and the gamification elements ("Correct answers help you kill zombies!) and offered some swag or prizes ("Meet the cast!").



Of course, that's not what academic MOOCs are supposed to be all about.



We are still learning about how MOOCs work and how they might help enhance learning online and offline. I have never viewed completion as the the mark of success in MOOCs and don't see all non-engaged students as "lurkers" because I know some of them are "auditors" interested in only a portion of the course content.



We have things to learn from non-academic MOOCs too.



 

Khan Academy recently launched a new interface that is smarter and can figure out where you have gaps and help you fill them.

Take a look at https://www.khanacademy.org and find (or create, if you're a newbie) your personal homepage. They have started the new look with math (their most popular content), but they are adding more subjects and new badges, and ways to level up on the skills you’ve practiced.

Especially, for high school students, Khan Academy has become a kind of build-it-yourself MOOC.

Of course, the content is geared towards school subjects, but that doesn't mean you can't learn about alien life in the universe, the muscles involved in shooting a free throw, or understanding Ponzi schemes (something many adults don't understand).

You can watch a video about science, economics, history, health, or something unexpected.

You can sharpen your math skills with an interactive exercise from the knowledge map.

You can even start programming without any previous knowledge or explore some existing games and simulations.

 

Moodle, the open source learning management system, has been used for MOOCs, including some of the original MOOC courses, like Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. That course was started in 2008 at the University of Manitoba and run by Stephen Downes (National Research Council of Canada) and George Siemens (Athabasca University).

Now, "Moodle for Teachers: An Introduction" will be Moodle.org's first MOOC. It is a 4 week introductory course for those who are new to using Moodle to teach. They recommend that you spend 8-12 hours per week participating in the course. Registration opens on 19 August 2013 and the course starts on 1 September 2013. There are no fees for taking the course and successful participants will be awarded a Mozilla Open Badges course completion badge that they can add to their Open Badges backpack.

Moodle partners (who use the free Moodle software but offer services for a fee) have offered Moodle Course Creator Certification courses for fees running from $200-$800 for at least five years (AKA Moodle Teacher Certificate), so it will be interesting to see if Moodle's free offering can replace those.

More at: http://learn.moodle.net

Patrick McAndrew, Professor of Open Education at The Open University, has a guest post on the Next Generation Learning Challenges blog about the "Bridge to Success" program - one of the “Building Blocks for College Completion” from NGLC’s first wave of funding.

The grant portion of the project has wrapped up, but they are still finding new people adopting the content, watching access to the site continue to rise. They have launched revised versions and hope to continue without additional funding.

The program was a collaboration of The Open University, the University of Maryland University College, Anne Arundel Community College (MD), and the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their challenge was to to help people who, for whatever reason, find it hard to cope in the early stages of college study.

It is interesting that McAndrew says that "The MOOC phenomenon shows signs of missing such people as it offers engaging learning experiences for the committed rather than nurturing the skills of learning itself." He notes that even with the large number of learners that have engaged with MOOCs so far, "the majority of those, by their own analysis, have existing qualifications or are eager to advance to further study."

MOOCs attract self-directed, motivated individuals, many of whom are learning for the sake of learning. In their challenge grant, they were working with students who are struggling and often not motivated.

They found that usage of these open courses went beyond their college population. For example, "charities used the materials to enable some of the most disadvantaged in society to return to an education or workforce path."

New versions of the courses are now available with badges added and a structure to encourage self-study and to celebrate success. The new version takes some lessons from MOOCs to organize around a start date and to offer some extra support for a limited period. Timed to coincide with Adult Learning week in the United Kingdom, the supported period will run for a week, after which point the materials will continue to be available as open resources.

The new versions: Learning to Learn (L2L) is a course for anyone who needs help to get started in college-level study, and Succeed With Math (SWIM) is a confidence-building mathematics course. Both are designed for when learners are failing in trying to take college courses. These versions build on the versions piloted in Bridge to Success, with the intention of making the material easier to study independently by adding challenges that bring out the achievements for learners as they proceed. (The original versions are also available.) 

For more about the project, including introductory videos, webinars, and guides for educators and learners on how to make use of the courses, go to http://bridge2success.aacc.edu/