Open Ed 13: George Siemens

"George Siemens is a Professor at the Center for Distance Education and a researcher and strategist with the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute (TEKRI) at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. He is the author of the Connectivism theory of learning and co-creator of the first MOOC in 2008."

MOOCs: How did we get here?

A different view than Andrew Ng's corporate model.

 A bit of history
George began blogging and following Todd, Downes, etc. He was able to talk with innovative people outside of the institution. Most systems think that content is the start of the learning and his idea was that content was the by-product. We don't need content, we need good questions and community. Open learning was learning not owned by a system but created by people.

He described Wiley's Wiki Design - everything in a course is run in the open. He talked about the history of open learning through Connectivism and Connective Knowledge through Jim Groom's DS 106.

An alternative to institutional controlled tech, monolothic self/contained/ locked-in platforms, transmission pedagogies.

Knowledge is iterative and communal. So many people are involved in th production of knowledge that is hard to call it "owned."

He brought up the MOOC map and showed how MOOCs have "vomited" over the world. It is no longer an academic practice but a corporate enterprise.

MOOCs are not really new - distributed learning has a long history. People have been thinking about this for a long time. It is a mistake to disregard that history

Why MOOCs now?
It is a supply-side answer to decasdes fo change in demand-side learning.
Student profiles are changing - older students, more females, China and India are changing the profiles.

What is happening in MOOC research?
http://www.moocresearch.com
There are a lot hyped statements like "there will only be 10 universities in the future." Universities will increase in number because the students will be doubling in the next ten years. With the Gates Foundation grants - where were the researchers coming from? Most of the research is coming from th Education field and not just Computer Science.

Problems with MOOCs
MOOCs do not prepare a student to create, generate, solve and innovate. We need stuff that stirs the soul. They need to respond to society.

Openness is being lost in the conversation. The hype is driving the trends. Coursera does not care about openness.

What happened with MIT wanting to provide all course materials are open and now they are with EdX who wants to copyright everything.

Lack of innovation.

Dropout rates are totally irrelevant.  We are missing out on an opportunity for real research.

MOOC providers are disconnected from the research in education.
They need to look at social and generative education models - they exclude them because their technology does not do that well.

We are norming from Coursera and edX and they are concerned with revenue models.

We need to refocus on creativity and knowledge generation. MOOCs are just part of the landscape of the current state of education.

A MOOC is a web, not a website. It is a network.

A Domain of One's Own - reclaim the web. gather t artifacts of your digital identy in a central place that you won and control.

Don't just hate MOOCs, but look for another

Related articles

• MOOC Research Initiative (slideshare.net)
• cMoocs vs. xMoocs: Part One (hollyhudsond.wordpress.com)
• The Pedagogy of MOOCs (edtechfrontier.com)
• MOOCs and persistence (johnbaglow.wordpress.com)

What Part of MOOC Don't You Understand?

Stephen Downes (Photo credit: WordShore)

Educators who have not taken a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) and do not understand their history, are currently writing about these courses which is causing them to be inaccurately represented in the press. The main problem is there is all the publicity around Coursera and Edx that ignores other kinds of MOOCs.

I also think part of the problem comes from the age-old issue of looking at new technologies through the lens of the old - the "horseless carriage" problem (a car is not "horseless" because it never needed one). I think an example of this is found in the essay "A New Era of Unfounded Hyperbole" by Siva Vaidhayanathan, which gives us an example of a typical misunderstanding MOOCs:

"MOOCs, on the other hand, are more like fancy textbooks. They are all about the mass market and not the rich connectivity that established online courses offer their limited collection of students."

This is a gross generalization of MOOCs. I would go so far as to call the statement above "unfounded hyperbole." The first MOOC I participated in "Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008" was one of the most interactive and engaging experiences in my education. There were a couple thousand participants who all self-organized into study groups and communities. This happened not on accident, but through the example and facilitation of the MOOCs teachers, George Siemens and Stephen Downes. They would not like the work "teacher" I think because it represents the traditional, hierarchical structure of traditional classes. I have never taken a class that was "all about the mass market." The reason why we wanted a class with a lot of people is because we learn in those networks - we get to take advantage of the the collective knowledge and talents of thousands of people. If your MOOC doesn't do that, you might not be in a "class."

When Vaidhayanathan is writing about MOOCs, I assume he is not writing about the MOOCs that came from David Wiley, George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Cormier, or Jim Groom. I am sure he is writing about Coursera and Edx. I would not make any generalizations about those because I have never taken a class in Coursera or Edx. What I will say is that their pedagogy and methods are different from what are sometimes called "cMOOCs" or "Connectivist MOOCs."

Another of Vaidhayanathan's generalizations says that

"The classroom has rich value in itself. It’s a safe, almost sacred space where students can try on ideas for size in real time, gently criticize others, challenge authority, and drive conversations in new directions."

They can also be stultifying places where new ideas are not encouraged, where there is no real criticism, challenges to authority are not rewarded, and discussion discouraged (often because the lecturer won't/can't allow for the time). There are good face-to-face classes and bad. There are good online classes and bad. The same goes with MOOCs: my experience in CCK08 rivals my best classes at Berkeley or Sonoma State (both of which had some amazing classes).

Vaidhayanathan is not alone. I keep reading about the possibility of MOOCs going international when Canada has been in for four or five years ahead of the Ivy Leaguers. There are also a number of stories about how we might be able to take MOOCs for credit when this has been the case at University of Manitoba and Athabasca for years.

I do appreciate the last part of his article where he lists some possible upsides to MOOCs and asks that we "...focus on what we can learn and accomplish from the MOOC experiment and leave behind the unfounded hyperbole."

I would like to see less hyperbole and generalizations on both sides and more research.

Related articles

• Slip Sliding Away: The Open in MOOC (opencontent.org)
• MOOCs and Connectivist Instructional Design (cain.blogspot.com)
• Gates Will Fund $1.4 Million Research Project To Study MOOC-powered Courses At U. Of Maryland | Inside Higher Ed (huffingtonpost.com)
• MOOCs to Be Evaluated for Possible College Credit (nytimes.com)