Open Online Courses: Responding to Design Challenges

Open Online Courses: Responding to Design Challenges Terje Väljataga, Hans Põldoja, Mart Laanpere Tallinn University, Estonia

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What are open online courses?

MOOCMassive Open Online Course

Pedagogical design challenges

Creating and sustaining community gravity• How to design sustainable community gravity?• What are the mechanisms for bringing and keeping together distributed groups?• What are the tools and techniques that facilitate and support the emergence of strong community gravity?

Monitoring participation and content flows• What are the possible technological solutions for both students and facilitators to monitor participation, observe content flows and comprehend the overall course progress?• How a course design can contribute to support monitoring heterogeneous landscapes of tools and services, student created content and their flows?

Designing materials and activities• To what extent the material and activities are pre- deﬁned before the course starts?• To what extent students’ created and recommended activities should be included into this emergent course design?

Providing feedback• What type of feedback is realistic and required in open courses?• Who should provide feedback and how often?• How to increase the quality of feedback given by facilitators and participants?

Multiple case study

Research design• Multiple cases study method (Cohen, Manion & Morrison, 2007)• 3 open online courses• Focus on 4 design challenges

Three cases

Composing free andopen online educational resources

http://oercourse.wordpress.com

Course design• Wikiversity for planning and running the course• Course blog and personal blogs for all participants• Weekly blog posts and summaries• Personal introductions• Blogroll and OPML ﬁle for monitoring• Video conference at the end of the course

Learning environmentsand learning networks

http://opikeskkonnad.wordpress.com

Course design• Course blog and personal blogs for all participants• Weekly blog posts and summaries• Personal learning contracts• Four contact days in addition to online activities• EduFeedr for managing and following the course (Põldoja, 2010)• Group assignment in addition to blogging• Good feedback from the facilitators

Social network

Learning & knowledge analytics

http://www.learninganalytics.net

Course design• The participants were free to decide on their level of participation• No required assignments• Moodle forum and Twitter as main communication tools• Daily summary posts by the facilitators• Weekly video conferences with external experts

Conclusions

Conclusions• Open online courses require redesigning the traditional patterns of learning and teaching• Online tools must be carefully selected to support planned learning activities• Participants see openness as an opportunity, not as a threat

References• Cohen, L., Manion, L. & Morrison, K. (2007). Research methods in education. New York: T & F Books UK.• Põldoja, H. (2010). EduFeedr: following and supporting learners in open blog- based courses. In Open ED 2010 Proceedings. Barcelona: UOC, OU, BYU.

Thank You!Terje Väljataga Hans Põldoja Mart Laanpereterje.valjataga@tlu.ee hans.poldoja@tlu.ee mart.laanpere@tlu.eehttp://terjevaljataga.eu @hanspoldoja @martlaa http://www.hanspoldoja.net

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Open Online Courses: Responding to Design Challenges

by Hans Põldoja on Jun 21, 2011

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