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H817 Week 10 Activity 14 Comparing MOOCs

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Edited by Anna Carolyn Page, Thursday, 8 Apr 2021, 17:51

Compare either DS106 or Rhizomatic 15 with offerings from FutureLearn or Coursera. Write a blog post comparing the courses with regards to:

  • technology
  • pedagogy
  • general approach and philosophy.

During Activity 12 I came across blog posts by Jenny Mackness (Mackness, 2013) about her experiences of the OLDSMOOC (which I project managed back in 2013), in Activity 13 I read the 2014 paper Jenny Mackness and Frances Bell wrote about the 2014 version of Rhizomatic MOOC (Mackness & Bell, 2014) so it made sense to select Rhizomatic 15 as the course to compare with offerings from an xMOOC platform for Activity 15. As I had already done H880 in its first year (2019) on FutureLearn, which included studying The Online Educator MOOC on FutureLearn in the first few weeks of the module, I decided to go with reviewing that experience rather than sign up for Coursera.

MOOC

RHIZOMATIC 15

The Online Educator (FutureLearn)

Technology

Various blog platforms, Twitter, RSS feeds

Online VLE platform (Ruby on Rails software), comment function on every content page, follow others feature built in on the platform

Pedagogy

Networked learning, social learning, Constructivism and Connectivism,

Networked learning, social learning, Behaviourism and Cognitivism.

General approach and philosophy

Very little course content as the ‘community is the curriculum’ and ‘content is people’ (Cormier, 2015). Each week the course organiser posed a different challenge question with participants connecting via social media to discuss their perspectives of rhizomatic learning.

MOOC authors wrote course content in scaffolded ‘steps’ and various activities and some multiple choice quiz questions. Some activities were designed to encourage interaction with other learners via the forum spaces on each content page.

 

The link to Rhizomatic 15 (Cormier, 2015a) was one blog post on Dave Cormier’s blog, it had so many tags (but not one specifically for Rhizomatic 15 which would have been helpful) so I had to find subsequent posts of Dave’s about the course by using the blog archive months. Active participants in the course wrote blog posts and tweets in response to Dave’s weekly challenges about Rhizomatic learning and commented on each other’s blog posts; one participant curated these on his blog to make them easier to find (Singh, 2015), his list showed that in the first week there are 60 blog posts. It would be quite time consuming to read every single blog post for the 6 week MOOC, so each learner experience of the MOOC would be different, depending upon how much time they had for exploring the posts and their own perspectives. The blog posts are public, on blog platforms chosen by the authors, unless they have been unpublished, they would still be available to read now.

Interestingly, the Twitter hashtag #rhizo15 still gets used by the participants 6 years on as a reminder of their earlier connections and conversations, clearly the MOOC had a profound impact on some participants and their teaching practice, even if many of the tweets might not be immediately accessible (meaningful) to non-participants who would have to explore the hashtag further to understand the context. Tweets are public and searchable, though to write a tweet it is necessary to have a Twitter account.

Rhizomatic 15 was quite experimental in approach, it was interesting to note in his introduction blog post that Dave Cormier acknowledged some participants from 2014 had joined again for 2015; it would not be a repeat of the previous MOOC because that was also fluid and experimental. He referred to it as a camp which was learner-led rather than teacher-led and each learner was researching Rhizomatic learning alongside him in a collaborative learning research exercise. There did not appear to be any completion criteria for the course or if this was even an aim, it would be hard to define and measure completion for something which is a “deeply personal, individual process” (Cormier, 2015b) especially considering the nature of the topic as a “discussion about learning” (Cormier, 2015b) which had the potential to go in multiple directions.

By contrast, The Online Educator MOOC has teacher written content in a number of ‘steps’ for each week (each step is on a separate online page in the MOOC). It is necessary to login to the platform and enrol on the MOOC to see the content and participate in the forum at the bottom of each ‘step’ where learners could ask questions of peers or write their response to the activities. Some activities prompt learners to read, reflect then write about what they have read and understood; sometimes they are invited to share their perspectives in the forum. The platform also has basic multiple choice question quiz functionality for assessment activities. Completion of a course is noted by the learner checking their progress as they go and possibly (depending on the course) doing a quiz. Participation in the forums is not a requirement for completing FutureLearn MOOCs.

FutureLearn has functionality for following other FutureLearn users and seeing participation in conversations. The settings in the user profile settings have the following two options:

  • Tick this box to stop your profile appearing in search results. Only signed-in learners will be able to see it.
  • Tick this box to stop others from seeing your course list, comments, followers and followings on your profile. Only you will be able to see them.

However, even if the learner ticks both boxes, depending upon how many people sign up for a course, the comments could be seen by hundreds of people also doing the MOOC, so they are semi-public.

With potentially hundreds of comments on each ‘step’ page, it could be overwhelming to read everything or to establish good working relationships and connections with other learners. Indeed, for those of us doing H880 in its first presentation, when we were asked to compare forum use in the MOOC and the module, the difference in use of the forum function revealed that engagement in the social element of the MOOC was different from social behaviour in the module, even though both the module and the MOOC were using the same platform and functionality. In the MOOC people commented because they had been instructed to in the step, and the comments from H880 students in those steps tended to be longer, more reflective and conversational (because we were already getting to know each other in the module and would be connecting with each other for several months) than those of the MOOC learners who were not doing H880 as well. Both the MOOC and the module had forum moderators.

The FutureLearn MOOC functionality is much less distributed than the Rhizome 15 MOOC which has content (people’s blog posts) all over the web and requires some level of familiarity with social media technologies and practices to navigate successfully. Although FutureLearn has functionality for supporting social learning, it depends upon the design of specific activities whether learner connections made initially in the MOOC forum spaces might extend beyond the platform to other online spaces and tools (for example if learners are encouraged to use Twitter hashtags or write blog posts) to enlarge learner networks and introduce them to useful online communities.

FutureLearn utilises behaviourist and cognivist learning practices more than it does connectivist or constructivist practices, whereas the Rhizome 15 MOOC depends more upon constructivism and connectivism in its approach and philosophy.

References

Cormier, Dave (2015a) ‘A practical guide to Rhizo15’, Dave’s Education blog [blog], 10 April. Available at http://davecormier.com/edblog/2015/04/10/a-practical-guide-to-rhizo15/ (accessed 8 April 2021)

Cormier, Dave (2015b) ‘Content is people – exploring the myth of content’, Dave’s Education blog [blog], 3 May. Available at http://davecormier.com/edblog/2015/05/03/content-is-people-exploring-the-myth-of-content/ (accessed 8 April 2021)

Mackness, Jenny (2013) ‘OLDS-MOOC’ category, Jenny Connected [blog] Available at https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/category/olds-mooc/ (accessed 8 April 2021)

Mackness, J. and Bell, F. (2015) ‘Rhizo14: a rhizomatic learning cMOOC in sunlight and in shade’, Open Praxis, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 25–38 [Online]. Available at http://www.openpraxis.org/~openprax/index.php/OpenPraxis/article/viewFile/173/140 (accessed 8 April 2021)

Singh, Lenandlar (2015) ‘Rhizo 15 blogs’, Things Education [blog], Available at https://idleclicks.wordpress.com/rhizo15-blog-posts/ (accessed 8 April 2021)


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