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Round table presentation - MALET at Empire State College
- 1. A Meta-view of a Coursera MOOC Photo credit: Marian Read UNESCO HQ
- 2. Window shopping in Paris Photo credit: Marian Read
- 3. Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Web 2.0 Tools – on Coursera Access, Equity, Accessibility Ease of Use Communications Terms of Use, Privacy My own experience
- 4. A MOOC on the Coursera Platform By University of Houston
- 6. Ease of use
- 9. Top Forum Contributors Web 2.0
- 10. Terms of Use & Privacy
- 11. My Own Use I have used (for the first time) a screencast app (Jing), a Web 2.0 tool recommended by the instructors to show you the experience of a ‘learner’ within this online course. You may view the screencast at the following site: http://www.screencast.com/t/0sEFKgDg
- 12. My Favorite Coursera Courses Learning how to Learn Maps and the Geospatial Revolution E-learning and Digital Cultures Johns Hopkins University University Teaching 101 Moralities of Everyday Life
- 13. Window shopping in Paris Photo credit: Marian Read
- 14. References Coursera. (2015, October 25.) Powerful tools for teaching and learning: web 2.0 tools. University of Houston System. Retrieved from https://class.coursera.org/newtechtools- 003 Coursera. (2015). Terms of Use. Retrieved from https://www.coursera.org/about/terms Woodgate, A., Scott, A.-M., Macleod, H., & Haywood, J. (2015). Differences in online study behaviour between sub-populations of mooc learners. Educación XX1, 18, 147–163. doi:10.5944/educXX1.13461
Editor's Notes
- As a learner in the Social and Ethical Issues course with the MALET program taking a peak into a Coursera MOOC has given me the opportunity to look from the general to the specific, or take a top down approach. Here then is my ‘meta-view’ of this coursera MOOC, much like my view of this world globe that is in the garden of the Unesco world headquarters in Paris.
- Finding the right MOOCs for you is like window shopping. Neither window shopping nor MOOC exploration cost anything except your time. Unless you are assigned a particular MOOC like we were in this case, normally you just browse the MOOC platforms or sites where MOOC courses are aggregated and take a look at what is coming that might interest you in terms of timing and topics. Enrolling in an upcoming course is as easy as a single click. So grabbing your attention, usually through a short video, is the Window to the new experience.
- So in taking the meta-view to a MOOC, like my fellow learners I experienced Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning: Web 2.0 Tools over a 5 week period in October and November 2015. This Round Table presentation will focus on 5 areas: Access, equity and accessibility Ease of Use Communications Terms of Use and privacy My own experience
- The welcome message sent to my personal email was timely, it arrived on the day that the course started 12 October 2015. It set out the Goal in a personalized way: ‘we’ are going to explore strategies and approaches to successfully integrate Web 2.0 tools into ‘your’ instruction regardless of ‘your’ content area or age of ‘your’ learners It set clear Objectives: ‘You’ will learn how to use these tools effectively in ‘your’ classroom And it promised a sound Methodology: Unique problem based scenarios will help ‘you’ to understand how to choose the best Web 2.0 tool for ‘your’ needs. ‘You’ will take part in a robust exchange of practical ideas while participating in online discussion forums. So we knew from the beginning that Learner to learner communication would be an important learning tool.
- Regarding Access, courses offered on the Coursera platform are accessible for free to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. In this course learners were encouraged to identify their location on a map and 359 people did and the geographic coverage seems to be global. So assuming that your internet was working well you could access all the course materials: Videos, Readings, Examples of Web 2.0 tools, Discussion forum, Assignment instructions and rubrics, etc. Regarding equity, most MOOC learners are already well educated, many with undergraduate and graduate degrees, so it is unlikely that this course reached a significant group of people outside this category. This is one of the general criticisms of MOOCs as they originally set out to reach people who could not afford or didn’t have access to higher education. The educational demographics for this particular course are not available but from reading discussion posts many learners are teachers, like the classmates in this MALET course. This course appears to be available only in English which therefore makes it inequitable for anyone who is not able to study in English. Regarding accessibility , Coursera writes in its Help pages “We provide native-language closed-caption subtitles for all lecture videos, and most pages and features on our site are screen reader compatible.” Certainly text versions and closed-caption subtitles were available for all lecture videos for this course. https://learner.coursera.help/hc/en-us/articles/201532675-Learners-with-Disabilities
- Overall the course was well laid out, easy to navigate, and each week everything was presented on a continuous page, requiring the learner just to keep clicking while moving downwards.
- Regarding communications, here is some evidence from Woodgate et al analysing several hundred thousand Coursera learners and the profile is overwhelming that most learners interact with the videos and quizzes. Some learners read the forum postings and relatively few post the forums and even fewer participate in assignments and peer assessments. There is no data available for this course but likely it is consistent with this categorization.
- https://class.coursera.org/newtechtools-003/wiki/About_The_Team The strategy of this instruction team was to be as personal as possible. Here we see the photo of the group that was posted on the main page. Their emails, starting with the first one communicated informal friendliness: “’We’ look forward to sharing our passion for how these amazing tools can be used to help expand your teaching with technology and support your students’ learning, motivation and engagement” ‘Sara, Bernard, Susie, and the Powerful Tools for Teaching and Learning Team’ Certainly the lecture videos and the example videos kept up this friendly, helpful, enthusiastic tone.
- https://class.coursera.org/newtechtools-003/forum/reputation For learners who were trying to get a certificate, participation through posting in the discussion and commenting on 3 other posts, weekly, is expected. Certified Texas teachers were eligible to receive 15 hours of Continuing Professional Development credit if they earn a Statement of Accomplishment so possible some of them were active in the discussion forums. The forum reputation list was easily available just by clicking, so those who wished to gain points could see their progress. Interestingly among the top point earners was a learner who had started only 4 threads, made 42 posts and was upvoted 58 times. So the upvoting was a crucial factor.
- Coursera’s Terms of Use, Privacy and Copyright is found at the bottom of the coursera platform pages, not within a particular course.– I copied 3 webpages related to these topics to a word document and the document ran 29 pages or over 10,000 words. I did not take the time to study it in detail however it is very similar to the terms and conditions that I reviewed in the edX platform that I wrote about in Module 1. Any user posts, for example, are automatically licensed to Coursera to use however it wishes. Even if you close your account, the information about how you interacted with the courses (by the keystroke) is archived and kept and used for research purposes and can be sold as an asset if Coursera is sold.
- In my MALET blogposts about this MOOC I was quite positive about the course. I think that it is well presented and uses many of the instructional design good practices that we are learning in MALET. I think that the assignment and marking rubric looked pretty complicated so probably not that many learners will complete the course and get the certificate. This however is ‘normal’ in a MOOC. As you have seen I learned about several tools, used at least one, and feel that I can go back when I’m not so busy and use the ‘curated’ list. I really liked the personal learning network introduced in week 5 and have already started something similar with my twitter feed.
- In case you are looking for more MOOCs to follow on Coursera, here are five that I enjoyed, although to be honest out of the 5 I only got one certificate. But, in some of the other courses I learned some good skills or developed an appreciation of a subject that I didn’t know much about beforehand.
- So back to Window shopping. Has the experience of the first MOOC whetted your appetite to cross the street, open the door, and take a look inside another MOOC? Thanks for watching my presentation and I look forward to hearing about your experiences.