MOOCs, Group Work, and Instructional Design

Debate Chamber of the Oxford Union Society (Wikipedia)

Everything Old is New Again
In my last post I pointed out that all the arguments about MOOCs sound so much like the old arguments against online education in the 90s. One of the main arguments for authentic online learning in the 90s was the possibility of making online classes social environments. This fit well with the pedagogy of Constructivism. Constructivism says that knowledge is constructed when new information comes into contact with previous knowledge and evaluated against experience. Social Constructivism is an outgrowth of Constructivism that "extends constructivism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings" (Moodle). The instructors goal then was to facilitate these connections. In the 90s, this learning theory seemed to fit what was happening with effective teaching online. The goal of online assignments was to give students the opportunity to receive new information, hold it up to previous knowledge and experience, share that with a group, and then together, coming to new conclusions or new knowledge. Educators and researchers like Palloff and Pratt with their emphasis on learning communities, promoted group work and discussion forums as the solution to the badly performing classes that were basically online repositories of documents and maybe multimedia files. Over and over again, from the early days of online learning, the research shows that the greater the engagement in an online class, the higher the success and retention rates. Engagement does not mean clicking a link, widget or consuming media - it means actual interaction with students and instructors as well as content.

George Siemens

Everything New is Old Again
Today, we have learning theories that are evolving towards a more complete accounting of how we learn online. I am thinking here of George Siemens and Stephen Downes' theory of Connectivism. I am not ready to throw out the Constructivist baby with the pedagogical bath because Connectivism is still in the Copernicus vs. Relativity explanation for gravity stage - I believe logically and experientially that the theory is right, but I am not ready to use it to put a satellite in orbit. This doesn't make the theory wrong. We need to be doing more research; it is just a matter of time. For myself, I am satisfied that this new theory accounts for much of what is going on with Constructivism. I am going to let the Phd's battle out the details: instructional designers have courses to create, assignments to design, and faculty to work with. A good working theory is a good working theory. A lot of what we are doing with online classes and MOOCs is testing the viability of Connectivism.

What Then Should We Do?
So this preamble is really a way to point out that everything that makes authentic learning work in a brick-and-mortar classroom are the same things that make online learning work. And as a teacher and instructional designer, I have a really practical end in mind. To my way of thinking, there is no difference between an online discussion forum and the Debate Chamber of the Oxford Union Society except one is more expensive and acoustically louder than the other. They are just different platforms. A MOOC is just another platform. George Siemens wrote back in March that MOOC providers were going to have to rely more on group work to be successful. I find this sentence especially funny and pertinent here: "The 'new pedagogical models' (A Silicon Valley term meaning: we didn’t read the literature and still don’t realize that these findings are two, three, or more decades old)...." But what kind of group work should we use and how can we ensure that it is successful? Siemens points out that there is a high dropout rate in MOOCs that could make group work a problem, but I believe that group work is one of the engagement pieces that is missing from many of these MOOCs (especially those using content delivery model rather than the content creation model).

Ensuring the Success of Group Work
Faculty and students have often told me about problems with group work. What do you do about the alpha student who needs to be the leader and do all the work? How should instructors handle the student who has little motivation? I have a blog post coming about this but essentially there are eight things needed for a successful group work project:

1. Clear objectives
   Students need to know the exact purpose of the assignment. Let the students know where they are going.
2. Detailed instructions
   This is particularly important in a MOOC because students tend to have less contact with the instructor. A detailed instruction document accompanied with a video and some examples are very useful here.
3. Give each student a specific role
   This prevents one person from taking over the process and helps with assessment too.
4. Communicate expectations in advance
5. Use collaborative tools
   Model the means for useful collaboration. Give students instructions for setting up a wiki or a Google site for collaborating
6. Facilitate and model leadershipSometimes good leadership is not getting in the way of good work. Leadership in MOOCs means that you live the model: you are connected and engaged in your course. You cannot disappear for two weeks and expect this to work. 
7. Encourage networks
   Having the students using social media tools allows them to bring other subject matter experts into the project.
8. Provide assessment and closure
   You would not want to participate in a MOOC with an endless series of unconnected assignments with no sense of closure. Assessment in group work gets interesting. I liked to use a blank form for the students to divide up participation points.

I will be posting a short article on how these components work here on this blog.

Kinds of Assignments:
The ubiquity of internet access and the proliferation of collaborative tools and platforms makes collaborative learning more available than it has ever been. This allows us to design a wide variety of assignments that are ideal for MOOCs or standard online classes. These are just a few ideas here:

1. Group Research Project
   Group research projects are opportunities for students to get together and literally construct knowledge. Having students work on a research project and publish their results together on a wiki or a group blog benefits the students and the class. 
2. Group PresentationsStudents can work on presentations with one another remotely and create slide presentations with audio or even a film and work on the 
3. Media Projects
   Students learn a lot from content creation. Jim Groom's DS 106, a class that some would call a "task based MOOC" is an excellent example of students working together to create media. Students can create videos or podcasts. When they graduate from college, no one is going to ask them to write a 20 page paper; they will be asked to work in groups, use technology, and create media.
4. Debates
   One of our instructional designers here at Humboldt State University is using online debates in discussion forums.The debates are carefully structured and each participant has a role. This kind of prior attention to details is essential to online group work.
5. Role Playing and Simulations Role playing and simulations have never been easier because there is so much data online now that can be used to build simulations (I am thinking here of epidemiological data, for instance). 
6. Concept MapsTypically these are solitary projects but having a group negotiate what should be in a concept map and how concepts relate to one another are a good way to allow the students to clarify those concepts with and for one another rather than having the instructor spoon-feed "meaning" to them.
   
7. Infographics This is a good project for groups because the roles can cover a wide-variety of learning modalities and abilities: some students can gather data, others develop art work, and others can write interpretive materials.
   

Any of these assignments can be created in advance and given to small groups. The students benefit not just from following the steps of the projects, but through sharing the end results with other groups. 

Related articles

• MOOCs: taxonomy of 8 types of MOOC (downes.ca)
• Joined a Mooc! Instructional Design for Mobile Learning (joshchalmers.wordpress.com)
• MOOCs: Lets Do The Timewarp Again! (cain.blogspot.com)
• MOOCs and the Elite Edupunk Way (drapestakes.blogspot.com)
• Yet More Conflation of MOOCs with Online Education: An Open Letter to Dr. Matloff (insidehighered.com)

Utah State's Open Courseware

Image via WikipediaUtah State University has an excellent collection of open courseware. This is a really exciting time to be involved in education because more and more institutions and instructors are making their teaching materials available to a wider audience. I was particularly interested in their instructional design course (I am a director of instructional design). I am working with staff who are new to the instructional design world and have been looking for materials to introduce them to the arcane and mysterious world of ID. Dr. Joanne Bently is the instructor and author of this course. It is from 2005 and based on the ADDIE model of instructional design. Though there is criticism out there of the ADDIE model as sometimes to rigid and formulaic, I think it is a good foundation to help new instructional designers to think about design as a process and teaching and learning as a collaborative project. The course is open for anyone to use, explore, or download.

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• How to Take an Online Course for Free (distance-education.org)
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Instructional Design in a Connected World

In reading discussions and listening to George Siemens and Stephen Downes speak in our class, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge, I have heard and read a lot of narrow and overly simplistic definitions of instructional design. Much of what has been said characterizes instructional design as mechanistic, linear, and formulaic. To an extent, there is some truth to this because instructional design has many problems to solve - one of them, for instance, might be that factory workers may need to know how to operate a specific piece of equipment or billing coders in hospitals may need to know some legal procedures. In cases like these, the important thing is that the information is being given clearly, in sequence, and in a way that will ensure that everyone is on the same page. An added bonus would be if you had a good instructional designer who could also include in that training:

• problem-solving skills,
• practice sessions that helped users remember the sequence of procudures,
• interactivity with other learners,
• attention to multi-modal learning (e.g. visual or aural learners)
  
• and a community of professionals where learning would continue

But I am ahead of myself and the above list is not typical of a lot of instructional design.

The other problem that instructional designers have to solve is the unifority of curriculum. I know that the "throw the kids in a bucket of clay and watch them sculpt the Pieta" crowd flinches when they hear this. But the problem goes something like this: if English 101 is a requirement to succeed in Philosophy 110, how do ensure that students are getting the same level of education in all English 101 classes? Now lets say you have a teacher who follows her instincts, doesn't believe in standards and thinks that the students will learn more about writing if they keep a journal, read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence" and just "be here now." In an ideal world, a teacher like that would get on fine, even without tenure, but we do not live in that world yet. Creating that world is not the work of instructional designers. For me to say, "I do not agree with the current standards so everything I design is fundamentally flawed" means that I should be doing something else. It would be as if someone were to hire an engineer to build a bridge and that engineer said "we really should be flying over this river, not driving." I do not particularly like multiple choice tests, for instance, but my job as an instructional designer is to help instructors design the most effective multiple choice tests. I have found that by scaffolding the questions using Bloom's Taxonomy to be a demonstrably effective way to create those tests. Not every theorist likes Bloom, but not every theorist out there is tasked with making a multiple choice test work! And I can't wait around for the Rousseauist utopia to come before I work on the test.

Good instructional designers keep up on the latest learning theories, teaching methods, and instructional technology. We do this not to tell a teacher how to teach, but to help instructors solve problems. Most teachers do some things really well. There are other things that teachers may not like to do, like deliver the same lecture in their history course semester after semester. This teacher would benefit by having someone who could show him how to record lectures and put them online, reserving the classroom for the discussions that he enjoys moderating and participating in. Or an institution wants their employees to be more productive at their work and have the fore-sight to see that it might be a training issue. People often do not do the work you want them to do if you have not told them (or don't know) what that work really is! An instructional designer can look at a job, interview the management and workers, and by bringing everyone together, discover what they need to know and how to build training for that.

Teachers and administrator often do not have the time to keep up on the latest developments in instructional design and technology. Why should they? They have enough cut out for themselves in teaching and staying current in their field, they cannot be expected to wade through all of the commercial hype and rapid changes in technology from day-to-day. An instructional designer is a contact person into the meta-disciplines around instruction. This is not telling anyone how to teach but being a resource of information, tools, and techniques that can increase the interactivity, communication (both in breadth and depth), and community of a course.

In my own day to day work, I wear many hats: counselor, teacher, researcher, education historian, data analyst, administrator, artist, etc. I use a wide variety of methods and tools that are carefully matched to the problems being solved. There are times when I have to think like a Cognitivist ("What would be the most efficient way for students to memorize this information?"), or a Constructivist ("Where in this course can we increase opportunities for students to communicate and share with one another?") or a Connectivist ("How can we create a network that will allow the students to learn now and continue their professional growth?"). Teachers do a lot of things really well, but they don't always know why some of the things they do in the classroom work. An instructional designer can map out the successes to help instructors reproduce it in other areas of their teaching. That mapping out process can then be turned around to help create an institutional course development process: one that does not tell someone how to teach, but how to manage all of the processes that can (or even should) go into a face-to-face or online course.

Instructional designers also create networks: they can connect with other instructional designers, bring new teachers together with experienced teachers, they link instructors to learning opportunities, and help connect students with more experienced students or graduates who are working their professions. Each one of the problems above require communication skills and network building. The work of the instructional designer will always be relevant because ultimately their job is making connections and managing change.