MOOC's Anatomy. Microblogging as the MOOC's Control Center

The 9th International Scientific Conference
eLearning and software for Education
Bucharest, April 25-26, 2013

MOOC'S ANATOMY: MICROBLOGGING AS THE MOOC'S CONTROL CENTER

Carmen Holotescu
Politehnica University, Department of Computer Science, 2 Bd. V. Pârvan, 300223 Timi șoara, Romania
carmen.holotescu@cs.upt.ro

Gabriela Grosseck
West University of Timișoara, 4 Bd. V. Pârvan, 300223 Timișoara, Romania
ggrosseck@socio.uvt.ro

Vladimir Crețu
Politehnica University, Department of Computer Science, 2 Bd. V. Pârvan, 300223 Timi șoara, Romania
vladimir.cretu@cs.upt.ro

Abstract: During the last five years, MOOC, the acronym for “Massive Open Online Courses”, has
become a trend that evolved at an unprecedented pace, accelerated by high profile entrants like top
ranked universities and open platforms. The paper explores the most important MOOC projects, with a
particular emphasizes on dimensions such as: social media and microblogging platforms for content
distribution, facilitators activities, participants interactions, and relations with mobile learning and
Open Educational Resources (OERs). The authors also present the design framework of the first
Romanian MOOC (roMOOC), which will be run in the summer of 2013, for teachers and practitioners
from universities and schools. The roMOOC topics are related to social media and OER integration in
the teaching and learning process, while the control center for connecting the distributed participants,
facilitators/experts, content and interactions will be Cirip.eu, a Romanian educational microblogging
platform.

Keywords: MOOC, microblogging, social media, higher education

I. INTRODUCTION

The term MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) was coined by Downes [5] and Siemens
[24], who facilitated the first such online course with hundreds of participants distributed
geographically, while the content, communication and collaboration were hosted by a large typology
of social media platforms. The central topic of the course was “Connectivism and Connective
Knowledge” – CCK08 [6], [5].
In 2012, which can be considered the year of MOOC, this trend has evolved at an
unprecedented pace, accelerated by high profile entrants like top ranked universities and open
platforms. The three leading providers are: Coursera (Stanford University, 33 academic partners, for-
profit), Udacity (Stanford roots / no university affiliation / for profit) and edX (M.I.T., Harvard;
University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas, non-profit) [6].
MOOC is also listed in the Higher Education Edition of NMC Horizon Project 2013, with a
time to adoption of one year or less, even if “challenges remain to be resolved in supporting learning
at scale” [20].
This year the portal FutureLearn, the first initiative launched outside of USA [8], is expected
to open a MOOC platform, which is supported by Open University and other UK universities, and also
by the British Council and the BBC: "students will have opportunities to connect beyond the

immediate course to a world of open educational resources, including The Open University’s
OpenLearn” (http://futurelearn.com).

1.1 MOOC IN HIGHER EDUCATION
According to [25], MOOC brings a new “model for delivering learning content online to
virtually any person - and as many of them - who wants to take the course” having as central
characteristics the learner-centered, open access and scalability approach. Thus, in the online space,
the global appetite for global learning becomes a powerful force, with a growing number of
universities that try to redefine the idea of education through MOOC [19], [8].
Originally conceived as ICT interactive "events", in 2012 MOOCs make their first appearance
as a teaching activity. Surprisingly, the demand for courses became enormous and growing. This
approach allows higher education institutions to offer online courses to millions of students and
teachers to have audiences of tens and even hundreds of thousands. Currently courses cover a wide
range of disciplines, from Computer Science, Physics or Mathematics to Medicine, Humanities and
Social Sciences [8].
The main reason for supporting MOOCs by academic community lies precisely in this
possibility - to provide access to a high class education at which only a limited number of individuals
have had access until now. Even though the courses are not equivalent with those offered by
universities, they are similarly taught by experienced teachers from the best universities in the world
and the exams are in front of the computer.
However MOOC is not „an educational panacea” [1], it is a supplement for traditional courses
/ a recipe for educational reform which “has the potential to become a global higher education game
changer” [3].

II. EXPLORING NOTABLE MOOC PROJECTS. CLASSIFICATION

In order to understand the challenges in prototyping a successful MOOC and in organizing the
first Romanian MOOC (roMOOC), we have explored and evaluated some representative projects,
classified by literature in the following categories:
a) Network-based: cMOOC – Constructivist MOOC. The explored courses - CCK08, CCK09,
CCK11, mobiMOOC, etMOOC and eduMOOC - are flexible, with the content co-created,
shared and discussed by participants on a large area of social media platforms. “They are
based on the explicit principles of connectivism (autonomy, diversity, openness and
interactivity) and on the activities of aggregation, remixing, repurposing and feeding forward
the resources and learning.” [23];
b) Content-based: xMOOC – "x" represents "extension", "experimental" or "multiplied" up. The
explored courses – on the platforms MITx, edX, Coursera, Udacity - are usually offered by
universities or their spin-offs and are structured around fixed content and assessment [17].
c) Task-based: pMOOC – project-based or task-based MOOC is a new category represented by
two courses that were explored: OLDS-MOOC, that "combines a constructivist pedagogical
orientation with a practical and authentic outcome" [21] and DS106 (http://ds106.us),
designed as a storytelling workshop, in which the participants had to create digital stories.
Based on literature and courses reviews and on direct participation in a few courses (CCK08,
etMOOC, HTML5 Game Development on Udacity), our study compares a number of 14
characteristics of MOOCs: institution that offers the course, course advertising / mode of subscription,
topics, central platform for content/activities/interaction, social media platforms, microblogging usage,
connection with OER, mobile learning features, duration, facilitators/guest lectures, number of
participants/completion rate, facilitation for sense of community/ learning community nurture/
pedagogy, feedback/assessment and certification.
Due to the limited space of this paper, only one representative course from each category will
be described here, while the entire study is presented as a spicynodes mindmap at
http://cirip.ro/grup/lds.

a) Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08), the cMOOC that started the MOOC
movement, was organized by the Learning Technologies Centre and Extended Education at
the University of Manitoba for 12 weeks, starting with September 9, 2008. It had as topics
connectivism, openess and new roles of teachers [4]. The facilitators were George Siemens
and Stephen Downes, while other very well known experts such as Terry Anderson, Alec
Couros, Howard Rheingold and Nancy White acted as guest lectures.
The central platform was CCK08 blog/wiki, with readings, resources, activities and
assignments, each course topic being presented in an audio/video clip or document. Each day
the participants received a newsletter, this contributing to the community nurturing and
motivation. The central wiki was translated by participants in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,
Hungarian and Chinese.
Meanwhile a lot of social media platforms were used, suggested by facilitators or by
participants: Elluminate for guest lectures, Pageflakes aggregated participants contributions
tagged cck08 on personal blogs, Delicious, Flickr and Slideshare, Moodle forums used for
users interactions, Twitter, Facebook (CCK08 group), seesmic for video messages sent by
participants, uStream, Google Maps with participants locations, Second Life, Google Groups,
Twine, Wordle, Google Reader and Yahoo pipes for content aggregation, etc. Most of the
course resources were CC materials and little OERs (resources on different social networks)
[27].
The microblogging technology was used for participants interaction, but not in an extended
way: the central Twitter account for this course @cck08 has 44 tweets and 146 followers, and
the participants sent approx. 600 tweets tagged #cck08.
25 students from University of Manitoba were for credit participants and were assessed by the
facilitators for activities such as: weekly reflections on blogs, participation in Moodle forums
and commenting on blogs by peer learners in the course, three short reflective papers (500-750
words), also a final project as a video, podcast or presentation addressing issues like: "What is
the quality of my learning networks - diversity, depth? How connected am I? How has this
course influence my view of the process of learning?" etc.
There were also 2200 external/informal participants “who self-organize their participation
according to learning goals, prior knowledge and skills, and common interests" [18].
However, only 84% of the formal participants and 6% of the informal participants completed
the course [7].
“It is not the first large course offered on the Internet. What makes this course unique is the
combination of these elements: its large size, its openness, and its for-credit status. It is the
first course explicitly designed according to the principles of connectivism” [5].
CCK08 was offered again by the same facilitators as CCK09 and CCK11, with a refreshed
vision on how to better involve and motivate the participants, and as PLENK2010 (Personal
Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge) in a larger facilitation team.
b) The first xMOOC was “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”, with the first run on the online
space at https://www.ai-class.com, organized in partnership with Stanford Engineering, during
October 10 to December 18, 2011. The course was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter
Norvig, who considered it “a bold experiment in distributed education”. The curriculum of the
Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course, also similar materials, assignments and
exams were used. There were 160,000 registered participants from over 190 countries. Based
on automatically-graded assignments a percentage of 16% completed all the tasks. The
participants informally shared on Twitter (central account @StanfordAIClass with 200
tweets) and on the Stanford AI Class Google group. The video lectures were published on
youtube (http://www.youtube.com/knowitvideos), being translated by volunteers in 40
languages.
The course was then moved on Udacity, a for profit platform/organization offering free
courses in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science, for “democratizing education”. Only
for-credit courses are paid and they are run together with San Jose State University. The
business model considers also the partnership with Pearson VUE for testing centers and a “job
placement program” (http://blog.udacity.com).

c) The course that defines the pMOOC category, “Learning Design for a 21st Century
Curriculum” (OLDS-MOOC), was recently run for 9 weeks by JISC, starting with January 10,
2013 and had as topic “Curriculum design with OERs”. Professor Gráinne Conole and a group
of UK professors/experts facilitated this free course for 1200 registered participants, the
content and interaction being hosted by Google groups for announcements and open
discussions, Google hangouts for user guide, Project blog, Design Cloudscape in Cloudworks,
YouTube, Slideshare, Twitter, Facebook, Scoop.it, Bibsonomy.org collection and Google
Calendar for Study planner.
The central Twitter account is @oldsmooc, with 900 tweets and over 220 followers.
The participants had to design a learning activity or curricular resource.
It is worthy to mention the innovative OLDS MOOC Badge Strategy for MOOC Badging and
Learning Arc (http://www.olds.ac.uk/blog/moocbadgingandthelearningarc): there were 9 types
of badges displayed on the Cloudworks profile, that attest the participation level (the badges
also support Mozilla Open Badges) [2].

III. AUTHORS’ EXPERIENCE IN RUNNING OPEN ONLINE COURSES (OOC)

In this section we present our experience in implementing and facilitating online / blended
courses with tens / hundreds of participants geographically distributed, and with content and
interactions hosted by different social media platforms:
• OOC – open online courses: “Web2.0 and OER in Education” [13] and “Using Blogs and RSS
in Education” [11, 14] were hosted by Moodle and Timsoft virtual environments. The courses
were free and more than 100 teachers, Master and PhD students, and trainers interested in the
courses topics have participated. The first course started with a f2f meeting, while the second
one was fully online. The materials were published on the central platform, being enlarged
with little OERs published on Youtube, Slideshare, Scribd and on facilitators blogs. Also the
interaction was spread across the facilitators/participants blogs and platforms where
collaborative projects were created: Delicious collections, wikis, Google Map mash-ups,
Flickr sets, DotSub translated clips, etc. The participants received a participation certificate
granted by the National/European projects which organized the courses. The characteristic of
MOOC that these courses missed is “Massive”, even if the participants were numerous (100),
more than is recommended for an ordinary online course (30-40).
• m3OOC – mobile multimedia microblogging Open Online Courses: During the last 5 years the
authors facilitated an important number of formal and informal courses on the Cirip.eu
microblogging platform, some with more than 200 participants, with multimedia content
collaboratively created on different social media platforms, accessed using mobile devices and
with interactions including external learners and experts [12]. The most close to MOOC was
the learning Cirip group (http://www.cirip.ro/grup/plebcn) using the method “Learning from
the stream” [9], in which tens of users, some being students formally enrolled in university
courses and others being teachers/practitioners, have learned about social media and Personal
Learning Environments (PLE) using a constructivist approach. They had a set of collaborative
activities based on the observation and interaction with the “Masive” content stream produced
by hundreds of internauts interested about/participating in the first PLE Conference in
Barcelona (2010). The PLE microblogging group was the center of interaction and of
aggregation for the content stream distributed on Twitter, blogs and other social media
platforms. This learning group has the “Massive” dimension for the content and for the
number of creators, but not for the participants who formally interacted with this stream.

IV. LESSONS LEARNED TOWARDS DESIGNING A SUCCESSFULL MOOC

We present below some advantages to be considered for setting up an academic roMOOC
template (it is a simple overview, not an exhaustive list, based on the lessons learned from the MOOC
study and from our previous open online courses):
• fading away the traditional educational barrier, eliminating not only the compulsory
presence in the classroom, but also unsustainable costs
• developing/improving digital skills
• always connected to real-life situations
• experiencing a more fundamental form of self–education and open-education
• access to latest technology: social media platforms, connection with OERs, mobile
learning facilities, etc.
• learning in activities such as homeworks, completing online surveys, writing mini-essays,
give and receive feedback to and from other course participants
• it is not boring (in most cases)
• learning from the stream: there are thousands of colleagues/practitioners/experts from all
over the world to interact with
• there are some forms of assessment/certification (the credits / certificates could be given
by the higher education institution that run the course, but also by the participants’ own
institutions which can assess the activities; certification could take the form of badges or
skill endorsements on LinkedIn/Skillpages)
• have a certain learning pace
• duration: definite start and end date with the same activities proposed to all participants,
"carrousel" MOOCs (users can "get on, get off" at any point) or "Mini-MOOCs" (2-week
intensive courses).
The authors conclude also that for designing a MOOC, the following possible limits should be
considered:
• eliminating the confusion with distance education: universities that already have
implemented this model, use information technology as a support for education, and not as
an alternative
• for MOOC facilitators, prior experience in designing and running online courses is needed
• a strategy for assessment to be implemented: auto grading, peer grading or some
combinations [15]. The grading system is in fact one of the most interesting aspects of
MOOCs in which each student is evaluated by peers. But what happens if those who
evaluate are not sufficiently prepared? Or are too demanding? Or simply do not allocate
enough time for this activity?
• a strategy for credit points to be implemented
• due to a huge audience, the teachers cannot answer to individual student’s questions, so
new methods to motivate participation and to consolidate the learning community are
needed
• usually such courses attract thousands of participants because the facilitators/organizers
are very well known experts and/or because the course is offered by a high ranked
university. As [16] noted: "sustained and personal engagement on the part of tutors with
course participants is impossible in such a context, and Coursera themselves recommend
an approach that borders on course automation. Within this scenario, the persona of the
course tutor can become more that of a celebrity with an almost talismanic status than a
present, real teacher."
• the biggest challenge is to make students feel they have a direct relationship with the
teacher, fact which is almost impossible, due to the huge number of students

• how to prevent cheating / plagiarism [22] and how to respect copyright and intellectual
property [26]?
• ethnocentrism, the imperialism of American lectures [22]
• another major disadvantage is that, many times, students are not prepared for didactical
activities at university level or are not enough motivated. Some courses may be the subject
of prior accumulation of knowledge and theoretical concepts. For Coursera MOOCs "the
completion rates can approach 20%, although most MOOCs have completion rates of less
than 10%." [15] [10]. What factors might affect the completion rate?
o Assessment Type: [15] concludes that the completion rates of courses which use
automatic grading range (4.6-19.2%) is greater than the one with peer grading
(0.7-10.7%).
o Duration: "there does not appear to be a negative correlation between course
length and completion rate, which is interesting as you might expect fewer
students to 'keep going' and complete longer courses" [15]
• finally, there is something paradoxically conservatory about most of the MOOCs: the need
to register, online tests, digital documents and institutional notices.

V. roMOOC DESIGN

The authors plan to run roMOOC - the first Romanian MOOC – this summer, with topics
related to social media and OER integration in the teaching and learning process. The course will be
also the first having as central space a microblogging platform: a Cirip public group; the course will be
a m3MOOC (mobile multimedia microblogging Massive Open Online Course), an extension of the
m3OOCs we have facilitated for teachers and students.
The expected number of teachers, trainers, and Master and PhD student expected to register is
500, the advertising will be realized on Cirip, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs and on academic
groups and mailing lists. The registration will be open/free, the specific group could be joined using
the Cirip or Twitter account or just sending an SMS with the name of the group. In perspective, if such
courses will be offered in partnership with universities, the payment of for credit courses could be
realized by SMS, a feature already offered by Cirip.
The multimedia materials will be published by the facilitators/guest lectures in the specific
section of the Cirip group, and will be enlarged with OER distributed on the numerous social networks
connected with the microblogging platform [9]. The core part of the course will be the multimedia
messages posted by participants/facilitators in the group; the group will aggregate also the
participants interactions/ (collaborative) content spread across blogs, Twitter and other platforms,
contributing to the consolidation of participants portfolios on Cirip. The content/interaction could be
created/monitored using mobile devices, the participation will be possible anywhere, anytime.
A duration of 3-4 weeks is envisioned for this course in which mainly collaborative activities
will be planned. Some tips of facilitation will be: prompt and positive feedback from facilitators for
technical issues and for the most interesting/poor activities, news sent by facilitators by e-mail/SMS,
encourage participants to give feedback to at least one colleague for each activity.
The course will be a task-based MOOC, in the sense that the activities have as aim to build a
strategy for improving the own courses taught by participants; each participant will publish the
learning scenario as a Cirip Learning Design object.
A badge system will be used for different levels of completion, determined using the specific
assessment features of Cirip. The participants who will complete all tasks will receive a participation
certificate.
The roMOOC experiment will give us the possibility to evaluate issues related to:
• a better understanding of the MOOC phenomenon and opportunities by teachers and
decision/policy makers
• do the existing Cirip features support a MOOC or other features are needed to be
implemented

• how to improve a MOOC facilitation
• how to assess the quality of such a course
• the opportunity to organize future MOOCs in partnership with universities/training
companies
• possible MOOC accreditation at national level
• possible business models, etc.

VI. CONCLUSIONS

The MOOC movement is an emerging theme of reflections, debates and stategies for the
educational systems worlwide. This paper and roMOOC, also articles in Romanian media are signs
that solutions should be searched by the Romanian educational actors too.
Will MOOCs reshape the higher and continous education? Which are the new roles of
teachers? Which is the new mission of universities?
In particular, could be a microblogging platform a performant center to control/support a
valuable MOOC?
In this paper we studied some successful MOOC formats and presented the design of a future
project-based MOOC, for which microblogging will be the central technology.
Many questions and aspects remain open and need to be addressed in future research.

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