1. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Degrees of Openness in Massive
Open Online Courses (MOOC)
Michael Totschnig
E-Learning Consultant
eMadrid, 17th of May 2013

2. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
About me
● PhD in Communication from Université du Québec à
Montréal
● Active in E-Learning R&D since 2005
– WU Wien
● LMS (Learn@WU), Authoring Tools, E-Learning Standards
– KnowledgeMarkets
● Learning Object Repository (EducaNext, Bildungspool Austria)
– Econtent+ project Icoper
● Outcome-oriented education (OICS)
– Hasso-Plattner-Institute
● MOOC (openHPI)

3. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Context for this talk
● Based on the experience as coordinator for openHPI,
a platform for xMOOCs
● Evaluation presented at Educon 2013 (with Franka
Grünewald, Christian Willems, Ralf Teusner and Elnaz
Mazandarani)
● Interested in the pedagogical, technical, social
innovations of cMOOCs
● Inspired by Fischer's theory of “culture of participation”
and “meta-design” (thanks to Franka Grünewald)

4. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Outline
● Definitions of Openness in cMOOCs and
xMOOCs
● Experience with openHPI (xMOOC)
● Cultures of participation
● Design guidelines
● Conclusions:
– Technical: From LMS to SOA
– Conceptual: Beyond the c/x dichotomy

5. MOOC – A New and Successful
Trend in E-Learning
■ What happens when courses traditionally taught to members of an
educational institution are offered online and opened (accessible
without cost and preconditions). They can attract a massive world-wide
audience.
■ Expected Consequences
– Content will be scrutinized massively and can be improved through
suggestions
– Participants will help each other solve problems and create vibrant
communities
– Learning analytics will allow to gain deeper understanding of learning
processes
– Competition between educational providers will motivate
improvements
– Economies of scale allow to decrease cost and increase quality

6. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OPEN
● Open Access !: free of cost and free of
preconditions
● Open Content ? Can the content be reused as
Open Educational Resources ?
● Open Source ? Is the system open to
experimentation ?
● Open Space? Where are the Boundaries ?

7. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Boundaries of the learning event
xMOOC cMOOC
Temporal fixed Potentially unlimited
Cultural One dominant voice Polyphonic
Organizational One institution in the center Network of institutions and
invididuals
Technical Monolithic system Aggregation of tools
Domain Definite and independent Infinite and connected
Knowledge Theoretical content Situated context, process

8. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
MOOCs and social learning
● Social software as „the ability to speak into the
context others have created“ (Siemens and
Tittenberger)
● Learning spaces as stages for the
orchestration of learning activities in specific
roles as individuals, groups, communities
● Are these roles prescribed by the system or
open for experimentation?

9. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
openHPI
● hosted at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam (HPI),
Germany
● Courses in English and German

10. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OpenHPI: Technical Platform
● Based on CanvasLMS (Open Source LMS
written in RubyOnRails)
● Private cloud infrastructure behind
LoadBalancer
● Video streaming from Vimeo

11. openHPI – Course Format
●
Course content is split into 6 units
●
Each unit is taught during one consecutive course week
●
Learning material provided during a week consists of
– sequences of lecture recordings,
– self tests and weekly homework
– additional reading materials,
– dedicated discussion forums.
●
Final exam is held in seventh course week
●
Cumulated result of homework and final exam decides upon
reception of openHPI certificate
1
1

12. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
openHPI courses
● In-Memory Data Management, Prof. Hasso
Plattner. 13,126 registrations, 2,137 certificates
● Internetworking mit TCP/IP, Prof. Dr. Christoph
Meinel, 9,891 registrations, 1,635 certificates
● Semantic Web Technologies, Dr. Harald Sack,
5,692 registrations, 784 certifactes
● Datenmanagement mit SQL, Prof. Dr. Felix
Naumann, currently 6478 registrations
● Web-Technologien, Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel

13. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OpenHPI: insights on community
management
● Leave questions unanswered for at least one day in order to allow
student engament
● Answer questions that remain unanswered for 3-5 days in order to
prevent student dissatisfaction
● Do not tolerate any dismissive behavior or bad manners. React friendly,
but determined
● Self-regulative community: Users react to offenses and protect the
teaching team

14. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OpenHPI: degrees of participation
● Inactive
● Passive
● Reacting
● Acting
● Supervising / supporting

15. OpenHPI: Emergence of additional
user types
● Domain expert: active when his domain of expertise is the current course
topic; gives high quality answers and points out possible mistakes in the
teaching material (including errata)
● Contributing user:
– provision of very detailed solutions to homework on private websites,
where the sample solution of the teaching team was not detailed
enough for all learners.
– implementation and distribution of tools for the solution of exercises
with algorithmic or mathematical nature.
– generation and allocation of audio files.
– discussion triggers initiated by students.
● Users switch between roles and become active in specific contexts

16. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Culture of participation and
Meta-Design
●
Concepts suggested by Gerhard Fischer
●
active participation and empowerment of a subject
● Design guidelines for participative communities
● „conceptualize, create, and evolve socio-technical environments
that not only technically enable and support users’ participation,
but also successfully encourage it.“
G. Fischer. “Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation”. interactions, vol. 80, no. 3,
2011, pp. 42-53.
Gerhard Fischer and Elisa Giaccardi: Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of End-User Development. In:
In Lieberman, H., Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (Eds) (2004) End User Development - Empowering People to Flexibly
Employ Advanced
Information and Communication Technology,:

17. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Roles in a culture of participation
Source: Grünewald et. al.: openHPI - a Case-Study on the Emergence of two Learning Communities. Educon 2013

18. Design guidelines I: Support
different levels of engagement
● 0: allow incremental discovery of the system
● 1: allow peripheral participation
● 2: give incentives for contributions (users are
responsible for knowledge construction)
● 3: grant privileges to highly involved
participants
● 4: allow experiments that extend, transcend the
system

19. Design guidelines II: Support
human-problem interaction
● Multiple choice questions assess remembering
and understanding (referring to Blooms
taxonomy)
● hands-on exercises allow much deeper
practical involvement (application, analysis,
evaluation)
● Exercises linked to concrete experience
● Challenges that require creativity

20. Design guidelines III: Underdesign
for emergent behaviour
● “allow the “owners of problems” to create the
solutions themselves at use time” (Fischer)
● Encourage negotiation and discussion
opportunities via channels internal and external
to the system
● Allow connections to external tools (social
networks, personal learning environments,
e-portfolio systems)

21. Design guidelines IV: Reward and
recognize contributions
● Support „social capital, reputation economies
and gift cultures“
● Stackoverflow Q&A model:
– Questions, answers and comments can be up-
and down-voted
– Users earn points and badges

22. Design guidelines VI: Co-evolution
of artefacts and the community
● „Support the mutual cross-polination between
the evolution of the communities and the
resources for system developments“
● Community ownership
● Seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding
(SER) model

23. Seeding, evolutionary growth, and
reseeding (SER) model
Seed: „collection of domain knowledge that is
designed to evolve at use time.“
Evolutionary Growth: „users focus on solving a
specific problem and creating problem-specific
information“
Reseeding: organize the contributions into a
coherent whole, create a new seed

24. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Conclusions: Technical
● From monolithic LMS to distributed SOA
● Re-use state-of the art backend services
where available and scalable
● Provide APIs that enables community-
developped clients for heterogenous client
environments and integration with third-party
tools (PLE, social networks) and external
learning facilities

25. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Conclusions: Conceptual
cMOOC and xMOOC not as dualistic
opposition, but as challenge for creating
underdesigned systems that encourage
participation, experimentation and creativity

26. Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Thank you for the invitation and
the attention!
michael@totschnig.org