This document provides an overview of a case study on an open online course. The study examines the community of practice that developed in the course. The course was an 8-week research writing MOOC with formal registered students and informal open participants. The researcher observed interactions, interviewed participants, and analyzed artifacts to understand how openness and community developed over time in the open online environment.

1. A Case Study of an Open Online Course
Suzan Koseoglu
Doctoral Dissertation Proposal

2. Massive Open Online Course (MOOC):
An online course made available to a large number of people without charge
(http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/MOOC)
Top reasons for institutions to offer MOOCs:
• increase institution visibility
• drive student recruitment
• innovative pedagogy
• flexible learning opportunities (Allen & Seaman, 2014)
Background

3. Typical instructional design characteristics:
• technically able to handle a large number of students
• has an open enrollment, free to anyone with access and free from any
prerequisites
• offered via online distance learning technologies
• has a definable topic, a goal to stimulate learning, a pace, and a beginning and
end (Kuna & Parrish, 2014, p. 61)
Background

4. Current state of the literature:
Two types of MOOCs: cMOOCs (based on connections) and xMOOCs (based on
pre-designed content)
Call for shift from content to community (going beyond broadcasting lectures)
Problems with generalization:
MOOC is a misnomer (Wiley, 2012).
More acronyms:
DOCC: Distributed Open Collaborative Course
POOC: Participatory Open Online Course
bMOOC: Blended Massive Open Online Course
SMOC: Synchronous Massive Open Online Course
Literature

5. Framing MOOCs:
Focus on openness instead as a defining quality (Kuna & Parrish, 2014).
Openness as access and process:
What is open and how? (Knox, 2013)
Both are connected to our educational visions: For what purpose?
Literature

6. Openness as access:
4Rs of open education (Wiley, 2009)
• Reuse, Revise, Remix (combining content with other content), Redistribute
Openness as process:
an ethos (Groom, 2013)
• develops with practice
• it can refer to many things: organization of the material,
• selection of instructional tools, how we go about open educational practices
I look at openness from a Communities of Practice perspective with an emphasis
on instructional practices.
Literature

7. Implications on pedagogy:
Open is a purposeful path towards connection and community (Woodward, 2014).
We need to create a culture of sharing and transparency (Cormier & Siemens,
2010; Wiley, 2010).
Challenges:
• know how
• massive participation
• doesn't always fit formal learning structures: problems with credentials,
organization, grading...
• teacher roles:
• the human touch (e.g., Kop, Fournier, & Mak, 2011; Kilgore & Lowenthal,
2015)
• the automated presence (e.g., Ross et al., 2014)
Literature

8. Need for the study:
• there are not many studies looking at the process
• most studies are survey based, use big data; we need more qualitative studies
(Collier, 2014; Veletsianos, 2013)
Literature

9. • What did community involvement look like in an open online course?
• How did openness develop in this open online course?
I will elicit from those (because I want to focus on the pedagogy and instructional
design at the end)
• How did the instructor facilitate the course?
• How did the instructor approach openness and open participation in this open
course?
Research Questions

10. • eight week-long open online course offered by a higher education institute in
summer 2014
• a general education course in research writing
• the course was connected to five others sections
Two types of participation:
• formal (registration limited to 20 students)
• informal (open participants)
Context

11. What were learners asked to do?
Read articles and blogged intensively for eight weeks. Practiced research writing
and how to go about inquiry.
Who was involved in the course?
(to the best of my knowledge)
• formal students (blogged almost everyday, sometimes tweeted)
• open participants (blogged and often tweeted)
• experts (these are the professionals who were following the course and
interacted with the instructor or learners occasionally via Twitter and blogs)
• lurkers?
Context

12. Why is this course interesting?
• The institution designed its own MOOC using Wordpress. The course
functioned very differently than a typical institutional MOOC.
• 6 sections were connected through a shared platform.
• All courses were delivered at the same time.
• Each section had its own website. Instructors had the freedom to modify their
syllabi. All course activities were completely online.
• The course was based on connected learning.
• The course has drawn attention because of its unusual format. Many educators
followed the course and interacted with the instructors and sometimes with the
students (I didn't know this when I started observing the course).
• Communities within a community?
Context

13. Communities of Practice
a perspective on knowing and learning (http://wenger-trayner.com/theory/)
Assumptions:
Learning is a social activity.
It happens with social practice.
We all belong to many CoPs (formal or informal).
Theoretical Framework

14. Three CoP characteristics:
(1) there needs to be a shared domain of interest
(2) there needs to be an active community
(3) members should engage in the practices of the community (Wenger, 1998)
Within my context:
(1) shared domain of interest (e.g., research writing, inquiry process)
(2) community (interactions within the community, norms, language, etc.)
(3) practice (the artifacts, the knowledge the community produces)
Theoretical Framework

15. Why does it fit the study?
It is a social learning theory.
The focus is on the community and its activities.
It specifically acknowledges lurkers (legitimate peripheral participation) and core
participants (those who are more active than the others), which are typical in open
courses.
Caution:
A community of practice is not a network of connections between people. There
has to be a shared domain of interest. The relationship needs to have purpose.
Members develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools,
ways of addressing recurring problems (Wenger, White, & Smith, 2009).
Theoretical Framework

16. Case study
• using qualitative methods
Methodology

17. (1) Observations of the community's activities
(2) Document and artifact analysis
in the form of:
• field notes (my description of actions and situations, accounts provided by
the participants)
• analytic notes (thoughts, reactions to field notes)
• analytic memos (detailed reflections, connections to practice and theory)
which will be part of a:
• field journal
(3) Semi-structured interviews with key informant people (for example, instructors,
most active members of the community, etc.)
Methods

18. web-based activity
interviews
I have access to (to the best of my knowledge):
• all blog posts, tweets, instructor videos
I don't have access to:
• weekly course announcements, weekly notes, any private learning activity,
student grades (posted on Blackboard)
Data Sources

19. 1. Begin the field journal. Examine the educational practice in chronological order (Week 1,
Week 2, ...). Also use observations from Summer 2014.
2. Note patterns of community involvement through the CoP framework.
• What is the shared domain of interest?
• What is the practice? What is the outcome of it?
• Who is involved in the practice? What are some norms, the language and history of the
community? What are the interactions like? Any interesting patterns?
Focus on how the community functions in an open space. How it changes over time, if at all.
Note instructional activity within and in response to the community.
3. Work on analytic memos to refine and elaborate on your notes after you finish examining
the community for each week of the class.
Data Collection & Analysis

20. 4. Create visual maps, map relationships (if necessary).
5. Meet with key people from the community to gain emic perspective.
6. As you move forward create 1st level thematic categories to identify different types of
community involvement. For example, lurkers, core participants...
7. When you reach saturation, create 2nd level themes by digging deeper into 1st level
categories. For example, follow key people, trace a pattern. Go back and forth between 1st
and 2nd level codes (for example, note somebody fading away, somebody who joined later...)
Data Collection & Analysis

21. Outcome:
• a field journal with:
• notes (descriptive and analytic) and memos (minimum 8) (these will be
available to the committee via a shared Dropbox folder or a Google site).
• visual maps illustrating relationships
• concept maps
• which will form the basis of:
• thematic categorizations
Data Collection & Analysis

22. Mostly manual analysis.
I will use HyperRESEARCH to organize data.
http://www.researchware.com/products/hyperresearch/hr-nutshell.html
With HyperRESEARCH I can create:
• codes, cases (similar to folders), code books;
• frequency reports, annotations, basic maps.
I can work on text, audio, video and image files.
Data Analysis Tool

23. Thank you!

24. Allen, I., & Seaman, J. (2014). Grade change: Tracking online learning in the United States. Wellesley MA: Babson College/Sloan
Foundation.
Collier, A. (2014, Feb 10). Building the "new data science of learning" - #eli2014 reflections [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://
redpincushion.me/2014/02/10/building-the-new-data-science-of-learning-eli2014-reflections/
Cormier, D., & Siemens, G. (2010). Through the open door: Open courses as research, learning, and engagement. EDUCAUSE
Review, 45(4), 30-32.
Groom, J. (2013, February). Futures of engagement: A domain of one's own. Keynote presented at Innovate: OSU's Annual
Conference on Technology in Teaching and Learning, Columbus, Ohio.
Kilgore, W., & Lowenthal, P. R. (2015). The Human Element MOOC: An experiment in social presence. In R. D. Wright (Ed.),
Student-teacher interaction in online learning environments (pp. 373-391). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Retrieved from http://
patricklowenthal.com/human-element-mooc-
Knox, J. (2013). The limitations of access alone: Moving towards open processes in education technology. Open Praxis, 5(1), 15-20.
Retrieved from http://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/view/36/pdf
Kop, R., Fournier, H., & Mak, J. S. F. (2011). A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support
on massive open online courses. International Review Of Research In Open & Distance Learning, 12(7), 74-93. Retrieved from
http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1041/2025
Kuna, M., & Parrish, P. (2014). How much OOO in your MOOC? Open Journal per la formazione in rete, 14(1), 60-70.
Ross, J., Sinclair, C., Knox, J., Bayne, S., & Macleod, H. (2014). Teacher experiences and academic identity: The missing
components of MOOC pedagogy. MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, 10(1), 56-68. Retrieved from http://
jolt.merlot.org/vol10no1/ross_0314.pdf
References

25. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity [Kindle Edition].
Wenger, E., White, N., & Smith, J. D. (2009). Digital habitats: Stewarding technology for communities [Kindle Edition].
Wiley, D. (2009, November 16). Defining Open [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/1123.
Wiley D. (2010, March). Open education and the future. TEDxNYED, New York City. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Rb0syrgsH6M
Wiley, D. (2012, July 1). The MOOC Misnomer [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2436
Woodward, T. (2014, November 12). Interview by M. Grush. Open Pedagogy: Connection, Community, and Transparency. Campus
Technology. Retrieved from http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2014/11/12/Open-Pedagogy-Connection-Community-and-
Transparency.aspx?Page=1&m=2
Veletsianos, G. (2013, Jun 5). The research that MOOCs need [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://www.veletsianos.com/
2013/06/05/the-research-that-moocs-need/
References