Personal Blogs

H817 Activity 12, Block 2: MOOCS and everyday life in a Northern Cluster

The reading here was useful and interesting and I found myself engaging in terms of what happens in teaching and learning clusters I know. I reflected back to on a recent conference on ‘team teaching’ in the Open University where, although I do not know if there was resolution, I took part in a debate on the value of ‘social presence’ (Kear et. al. 2010) as a means of guiding work in a-synchronic cluster forums and synchronic tutorial conferences.

The view expressed was that ‘social presence’ was a first step. However, my own prejudice (not even yet a hypothesis) is that ‘social presence’ as an immediate goal (or even ‘first step to other goals) may be intrinsically misguided. This is not to deny that ‘social presence’ is not required in our work but that without linking at a very early stage to cognitive and metacognitive presence, it must divert and even support negative outcomes.

There is anecdotal expert witness to the view that the virtue of MOOCs is in fact defined by their contribution to a debate on innovation in higher education ‘moving forward’ (Weller et. al. 2016, Liyanagunawardena et. al. 2013). Part of this evidence seems to suggest that MOOCs must work from ‘where people are or are capable of being, engaging in exploiting and developing those psychosocial ‘subject positions’.  Thus Stansbury (2016) reports that Australian data reveals that issues of online identity often dictated preference for optimum learning spaces online – those alien to ‘social media’ distrusting its effect on the integrity of their professional identity, whilst those who were not (the majority) felt that LMS provision needed to learn from social media.

What helped me to begin to think how different media might learn from each other was stunning research by Comer et. al (2014) on the use of writing in MOOCs for two different disciplines: English Composition and Chemistry. The evidence suggests that, far from ‘social presence’ being the necessary prompt to optimised participatory learning it was the development, through modelling, peer and teacher feedback on the effectiveness of discursive skills like ‘argument’. They suggest that this effect was greater when learners were prompted to understand the metacognitive value of such feedback to each other.

Although uneven there were specific ‘learning gains’ experienced through both giving and receiving feedback. However it was only, it was inferred, when learners were prompted by teachers that ‘giving peer feedback’ was  functional to everyone’s participatory learning that giving feedback yielded learning gains. There was on average c. 45%  report across both groups recording specific learning gains in ‘understanding' following peer feedback.

This suggests that the fear of a challenging environment that the ‘social presence’ movement has fostered has been to the possible detriment of learning. My practice is always to gear social interaction to high expectations: in Carol Dweck’s sense praise the ‘effort’ not the immediate achievement.  It also suggests that it is not counter-productive to shift attention away from the exchange of content to how best it is communicated in the written postings. It also suggests that people in higher education rise to the cognitive challenges in content and expression best if their role in the teaching and learning process is validated, suggesting that teacher presence lies more in modelling topic initiation and feedback and feeding back on these in concert with learners than in inculcating ‘teacher presence’. This is, after all, the lesson of Laurillard.

I see hints of this in my everyday teaching and learning. In the next presentation I will urge team experimentation with this model.

All the best, Steve