Well, since Stephen quotes me, and I’ve fully dived into Lisa Lane’s critique (the real juice is in the comments) of the Curtis Bonk/Blackboard/Coursesite’s MOOC “Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success , I guess I had better blog my thoughts here on my own space. 🙂 Please forgive the stream of conciousness, because if I take too much time to craft this, it won’t happen. Life and work is happening like a thundering curtain of water coming off of Victoria Falls. (Yes, my trip to Zambia is still strong in my memory!)
This is a particularly fruitful time for reflection because I’m working on three projects with aspirations to build capacity for facilitation of (mostly) online learning in some quite diverse contexts. Most of them have larger ambitious of scaling and becoming as much “network like” as much as smaller, bounded “community-like.”
Add to that the fact that there is such a streak of conversation, creative tension and interest as #Bonkopen (as us Twitterphiles know it) launches into its first full week, you know there is learning happening. For some, it is the eye-opening possibilities of scale, even if not fully realized (BonkOpen will see participation rates declined. I’m pretty sure of it.) There is and will be gobs more of learning, even if it is not the INTENDED learning. More about that later! First, the quote from Stephen’s OLDaily. (Emphasis mine.)
Intro video for Curt Bonk’s ‘Blackboard MOOC’ (I wonder how much Blackboard itself is putting into this project). The level of support from his home institution makes me envious: “IU has been highly supportive. Last week, there is a university press release as well as an article in the student newspaper. And my instructional systems technology (IST) department had a short online news story as well.” Not everybody is enthused, though. A comment to the Inside Higher Ed article points to “a long list of serious problems with Blackboard Course Sites that render it unusable for a MOOC” – there’s no blog subscription options, no profile pages for participants, and no blog comment notifications. As Nancy White says, “the design issue here is designing for a networked experience, not a group experience (which is foundational in a lot of Dr. Bonk’s work with a focus on community, etc.) Bb is not network centric.” See also Sail’s Pedagogy, “blogging within an LMS is just wrong.” And Lisa Lane writes, in “Leaving an open online class,” that “it’s the same old Blackboard, with more white space, nicer fonts and some cool icons.”
Let’s pick apart some layers here. We certainly have a technological aspect which I’m going to studiously ignore because not only is it ginormous, but I want to focus on the process of design and facilitation in this post. So we’ll leave the tech elephant in the room for a later post. I’m sure I can take a technology stewardship lens to it! 😉
Curt Bonk has been an amazing practitioner and scholar of facilitating learning, particularly online learning. He has been a source of inspiration to me and many others. What I really REALLY want to learn from his MOOC is how to apply his ideas and theories to a networked learning experience vs a group learning experience. I want to learn and practice these skills not just because MOOCs are all the rage. (Don’t know what a MOOC is? A massively open online course — see more here.) My motivation is because much of the work I’m doing with distributed teams, communities of practices and networks find their ability to AMPLIFY what they learn and produce requires access to, and from,the larger networks that contain their groups.
The sort-of-obnoxious part of me wants to poke at this particular MOOC which is about using tools for online learning success, branding itself as a MOOC, trying to use this network-intentioned form to learn about practices that have essentially built on the bounded small group form learning — the thing we often call “courses.” Does anyone else see the irony?
Laura Gibbs, who I thankfully “met” in the introduction threads of BonkOpen (by posting with a provocative subject line instead of a traditional “intro” one – which would be pretty obnoxious in the old model, and effective in a networked context) wrote in the comments of Lisa’s blog:
If Blackboard can make this massive class and call it a MOOC, very M and very C, while not having much O or O (is Blackboard really open? no; is Blackboard really online if it is so disconnected from the Internet itself?), then maybe even the term MOOC is in trouble.
The less obnoxious part of me holds a great deal of compassion for the team, because this is really a huge, transformational leap and many of us are trying to make it. And personally, I’ve stumbled. A lot! The term MOOC IS challenging. The concept asks us to design and facilitate in ways that are different for most of us. When you are really good at doing it one way, going another is a huge shift. Not seeing that this is a new way, or worse, pretending that it is but acting on old models, is problematic.
MOOCs have really forced me to stretch my mind and conceptions about what learning with and from each other can and does mean. Even the word “course” is not big enough to hold these possibilities. While most of my practices is outside of academia, there is perhaps more alignment on the design and practice challenges with non-academic learning than ever before. Because life outside of academia is rarely about the course. It is about the learning we want and need. This resonates with the concept of MOOCs.
I don’t think I’m the only one struggling to recoceptualize teaching, learning and facilitating in more open networked contexts. But we all sense something important here. Thus the huge interest.
Bonnie Stewart wrote about this recently, when she noted the recent EdX announcement from MIT and Harvard universities in the US. Can “massive and open” acheive the scale and the flipping of the teaching and learning paradigm AND disperse the control that our traditional teaching institutions (and platform builders, etc. etc) have exerted on the process?
The problem with EdX is that, scale and cost aside, it IS essentially a traditional learning model revamped for a new business era. It puts decision-making power, agency, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge pretty much straight back into the hands of gatekeeping institutions.
MOOCs are about finding that cliff between structure and the unknown forward trajectory of each of us as learners. It is about sufficient constraints that create conditions not for necessarily uniform learning destinations for every learner, but for a learner to learn into his or her own learning possibilities around the subject at hand. This includes who they learn with and from, the range of supporting tools they choose to adopt (tech, content) , and the density of engagement with the material and other learners.
If my hunch is right, this then asks us to seriously reconceptualize our facilitation and teaching frameworks. For me, as a facilitator, this has meant letting go of my deeply held belief that things START with socialization and relationship building. A simple example is “introduction threads” and “icebreakers” which we have used very successfully for building strong learning cohorts online — I’ve been doing it since 1997. These approaches are predicated on individual–>group–> wider network trajectories.
Steve Covello points out our past successful online learning experiences start with a profoundly human socialization and orientation which he is missing in BonkOpen (Again, from Lisa’s blog).
…this environment is unintuitive to fundamental human experience. It is mediated through an interface. The interface offers **nothing analogous** to the social environment which it symbolizes. I cannot be more emphatic about how important a framework of social orientation is to online learners. It is as if the greater importance in the development of an LMS is the *information*, not the human.
Yes, and…. MOOCs start at the network. Human intersections happen, but differently, mostly over dialog in synchronous and asynchronous contexts (chat room during a presentation, blog comments), facilitated by daily newsletters that scrape for a tag. Introductions in a cohort of 3000 is — well, ridiculous and we are crazy to ignore the fact. Creating subgroups is a strategy, but one that repeats the small group classroom model and that is what MOOCs are NOT. (At least this is my belief.)
Relationships happen when we encounter another and try and understand their point of view, share ours, swap content, even crack a side joke and develop an affinity. Then, amongst all the waves of people and content, we start surfing the same breaks. We run into other sets of surfers that have emerged, and plenty of soloistas. Relationships then create nodes and bridges across the network. And that glue of bits of information with the shared tag facilitates.
It is much less often that the “teacher” facilitates. And that, my friends, is a pretty dramatic reconceptualization.
Again, Lisa Lane, from the comments of her post wrote (emphasis mine):
The force of networked individualism is coming up against the bounded group(s) dictated (is that too strong a word?) by the Bb forums. One of the questions is what size group works? We have a small one here for an intense discussion, so we could argue “class sized” groups are better for focus. But networking is better for exploring. I just can’t figure out where Bb threaded discussions could fit into any of this? They worked in only a limited way in Moodle for the big MOOCs, and even there it was because the whole group didn’t participate. So is this an issue of size, or of a technology that simply cannot support a networked experience?
This tension between the concepts of individual and group, of individual, group and collective (public) goods through learning is also tremendously juicy and challenging. Mama mia! This is not “peaches and sunshine” as it introduces potentially competing goals — certainly for institutions vis a vis their people formerly-known-as-students. Maybe we throw out the concept of group as we know it. And if you know me, this is a very radical thing for me to say. I hold small groups and communities as something sacred. AND, I am not suggesting they aren’t. But a MOOC perspective suggests we start at the individual and network intersection rather than small group. In my experience, we arrive back at the small groups, but in a way that is more firmly knitted back to the network — and that IS the value proposition. Hm, I buried that down here, didn’t I? So much for writing at 6am.
So if we believe this is the direction that MOOCs are exploring, of networked learning, we also have to throw out a good bit of our past and previously very functional wisdom and practices. We have to reconceptualize the affordances — and this points strongly to the technology. Blackboard, for example, is not a networked affordance. Introduction threads are not networked affordances. Connections, text mining, and perhaps hardest to pin down, but for me at the deepest core, is reimagining what it means to build relationships and trust without our previously comfortable walls. Now we, as learners, both tear down and build up the walls.
As if Jim Julius was reading my mind, he also posted in the comments on Lisa’s blog:
So I wonder … has someone created a taxonomy of learning tools identifying their affordances and how well suited they are for networked learning designs vs. group-based learning? That would be interesting to consider …
I’m interested, Jim!
All in all, this is pretty darned radical. And sometimes stressful. It turns my hard earned practices and knowledge on their head VERY often. In fact, my gut instinct is we need to remove the word “course” from all of this. Find something to help us escape our past experiences and assumptions.
Finally, as I work to curb my own snarkiness, I’m reminded of the importance of cultivating sensitivity and compassion to productively learn from these opportunities. Again, from Steve in Lisa’s blog”
My oversensitivity here, I hope, will serve as the moral equivalent of what Temple Grandin provides for the livestock industry. Her research into the sensitivities of animals in captive environments has lead to improvements in stress reduction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin
And yes, these experiments and conversations are heady and exciting with potential. And I’M ALL IN!
Thanks for this, Nancy. It is heady, and discombobulating, all at once.
Thinking about the points you & Lisa bring up in relation to #Bonkopen and Bb and individual vs. group orientations (I know it’s more complicated than that binary sounds)…one of the piece I want to bring into next week’s #change11 discussion on Digital Identities is danah boyd’s concept of “networked publics.” boyd’s own work hasn’t (I don’t think?) gone very far to distinguish the difference between a networked public and a group, but I’m beginning to see it as key in understanding the potentiality of digital environments: it is neither the singular individual as we tend to think of our corporeal selves, nor the collective group member as traditional one-to-many media and educational models have conceived us (and conditioned us to conceive ourselves).
It’s the piece that interests me most about digital media, and the piece I think EdX (for all the increased access it may offer) drops from the MOOC equation.
Bon, you are welcome. I’m good at discombobulation too.
I am nodding very much at these sentences you offered us
What is so amazing to me about this continuum from individual/group/network (and not necc in order) is that identity IS a part of all of it, but the expression seems to shift. I haven’t read danah’s latest pieces. I should go dig them up.
Interestingly, later this month i’m working in a country with a very different culture around identity. I hope it shakes loose some of my cobwebs.
Nancy, this post and the commentary on Lisa’s blog should be required reading for anyone dealing with learning networks. I’m not in Curt’s Bb MOOC; he told me I wouldn’t gain much from the content. Ironically, I’m learning a lot from you guys who are in the MOOC (and the opinions of the dropouts, too). There are powerful lessons being learned outside of the MOOC; this echoes the criticism of Bb being closed and klutzy.
In 2006, I wrote a post entitled “Courses are dead.” It’s even more true today.
http://www.internettime.com/2006/08/courses-are-dead/
Thanks for the insights.
Thanks Jay. No surprise that you would find the resonance! 😉 I wonder if universities could sell something other than courses, if they would also expand their set of possibilities?
Thanks for the kind words Nancy. It was amazing to see all those people show up last night. What a scene it was. Extremely inspiring. But some things like 500 people posting to the chat window at once will need to be addressed. 14 polls last night but perhaps we need even more.
The reflections in the MOOC, too, are powerful and deep. Many who have established this field of open teaching write extensively in their blogs about it (Stephen Downes, David Wiley, George Siemens, etc.). They are thoughtful, integrative, insightful, and creative. I am envious for how they see the field growing and shifting.
Sorry Jay Cross did not jump in yet. (hi to Jay.) He is among those I respect. His posts are always filled with some golden nugget(s). He may not have learned anything, but he would have taught us a ton.
As I told, Lisa in her blog, I am still grading papers (late tonight) and all week from my spring class here at IU. In addition, I had a department retreat all day today. So starting the MOOC this week is hard (and ya, it was my silly choice to start this week so we would have 5 Wednesdays in May). More soon.
Hey Curt – it is lovely to have electronic connections here on the blog. You know you are one of my “teachers,” right?
Having facilitated JUST a week in a MOOC (#change11) and valiantly trying to reply to every blog post I could find and then weave it together, it became abundantly clear that my assumptions about facilitating MOOCs were just the tip of the iceberg. (see http://fullcirc.com/wp/2011/12/23/tips-for-facilitating-a-week-in-change11-mooc/ for a few of the hundreds of thoughts that have flow through my porous brain.) There was the subject matter role — asking and answering direct questions, surfacing key ideas, etc. But the most fascinating, generative and TIME CONSUMING role was network weaving, both between people and ideas.
So the content piece IS related and familiar to my previous structured and size-bounded course experience. And I’ve always felt that weaving (and SOMETIMES summarizing, but I’ve backed way off that over the years) has been part of facilitating online, but it was always AFTER the work of building trust and relationships. In my MOOC experiences – facilitating and participating– the sequence is different.
Where relationships emerge is where one individual “hears” and responds to another. In my week, some folks who had not felt comfortable found a comfortable spot. Others were frankly turned off by my offering. So the EXPERIENCE of my week created some new intersection points between participants and ideas. It did not scaffold them for the full group. This was a huge aha. It was not structuring of subgroups, but creating those moments, those experiences were people connect. AND this is not the only connection mechanism (thank goodness. We’d all collapse from the work!) The other moments were made possible by the feeds and summaries which facilitated people finding a post or a tweet or whatever, responding, and building a relationship with the others in that interaction. This mechanism scales. My “creation of a transitory experience” (like your live session this week I bet) doesn’t always scale (as you saw in the chat room). MOOCS layer these things. But we can’t STRUCTURE and SCAFFOLD them all, nor should we — because then we miss the distinct value proposition of MOOCs. Building learning connections and, to more critically important, building our capacity to build and generatively use these connections. Content we can find — by the boatload. Quality, generative connections are the track to continued and deeper learning. At least in my opinion. 😉
I’ll be deeply interested to hear/read/watch your reflections when you come out the other end of this. And I’d LOVE a conversation about how our time-honed practices do and do not port into a MOOC context! I’ll be following! (But alas, missing most of the MOOC as I’ll be working in a context with minimal connectivity half of May. Back to bounded groups and isolated settings! And learning through planning!)
Thanks again for stopping by
N
Asking questions, summarizing or weaving, surfacing key ideas, providing scaffolding and some watering of it, etc. You got it–how we assist in learning. A cognitive apprenticeship as Collins and Brown and Duguid might say. Linda Harasim and Cindy Xin at Simon Fraser U got me interested in weaving or summarizing back in the late 1990s when I visited. And Linda’s now passed pal, Robin Mason. Weaving. The art of weaving. Not too much…not too little. I used the starter-wrapper technique with my students for that.
This is a requotable moment. I love what you say here Nancy…about the Change11 experience.
“It was not structuring of subgroups, but creating those moments, those experiences were people connect. AND this is not the only connection mechanism (thank goodness. We’d all collapse from the work!) The other moments were made possible by the feeds and summaries which facilitated people finding a post or a tweet or whatever, responding, and building a relationship with the others in that interaction. This mechanism scales. My “creation of a transitory experience” (like your live session this week I bet) doesn’t always scale (as you saw in the chat room). MOOCS layer these things. But we can’t STRUCTURE and SCAFFOLD them all, nor should we — because then we miss the distinct value proposition of MOOCs. Building learning connections and, to more critically important, building our capacity to build and generatively use these connections. Content we can find — by the boatload. Quality, generative connections are the track to continued and deeper learning.”
The moments. Yes, the moments of change or finding meaning or connections. That is what we stay alive for. My research on extreme learning (http://www.extreme-learning.org/) is looking to document empowerment moments in the life process which technology (and people using it) has facilitated. We have some starter stories up. Many more to go. To me, it ultimately does not matter if the tool wherein it started was Blackboard or Wikispaces. What matters is that it happened.
So much happening in the world of open education since January (especially this week).
An interview on the MOOC just came out in the Evolllution and was posted to their site as a text and an audio file (the Evolllution is a relatively new site for higher ed book reviews and other current topics out of Toronto).
Interview: “Audio/Massive Open Online Courses: Taking Learning to a New Level.” Interview by Amrit Ahluwalia, The Evollution.
Article (shorter): http://www.evolllution.com/community_matters/audio-massive-open-online-courses-taking-distance-learning-to-a-new-level/
Audio file (full interview): http://www.evolllution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/MP3-2012-04-30-Curtis-Bonk-Interview-+18123351746.mp3
I also just wrote to this NY Times reporter who had a great op-ed piece in the NY Times yesterday (or today)…I told him about the Blackboard MOOC and other things. Perhaps he will show up. Smile.
The Campus Tsunami, NY Times, David Brookes, May 3, 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/brooks-the-campus-tsunami.html?_r=1&hp
This stuff is not hot. It is baking and sizzling. Lots of people like you blogging on it. Very cool.
OH man, so many links to follow (she says, looking at her to do list, and the list of links. Mmm, responsibility or exploration? Ayiyiyiyiyi)
Or perhaps…Responsble exploration…???
So much to think about. I have long been of the mindset that online education, when done well – i.e. designed to take full advantage of the affordances of a networked environment – ought to be superior to classroom-bound education. I have long worked with educators who would talk about how much better their classroom-bound teaching experiences were once they had experience with teaching well online.
So, is the end game here that all education should move from the group model to the networked model? As devices permeate our classrooms, that will certainly become possible in almost any learning situation over the next decade. Will the average educator be able to make this mind shift? Should they?
How will technology and content providers help or hinder this shift? What would be lost if we made this shift wholesale? What will be the major tensions in our education systems as the networked learning model rises and “competes” with the traditional model? Can those tensions be “managed” so that they are more creative than destructive?
Hiya Jim – Well, I think the “networked experience” doesn’t have to stand alone. I am passionate believer in solo learning, paired learning, small group learning. I think the unique advantage that can be leveraged in any of these contexts is that the learning does not have to be CONFINED to these any more… the linkages in and out have a role. The flip side of this is that networked learning, like anything else, has its dark and light sides. So I don’t want to suggest that it is a panacea.
The question that your last paragraph tickles for me is what do we take from the “traditional” model (and that itself is a hairball for me), and what do we leave behind? What do we adopt vigorously from the network model and what should we adopt with caution, if at all? ONe of my teachers told me “tensions are things to be lived with creatively, not resolved. ” I suspect this idea can be useful in our discussions, eh?
The “average educator” is getting closer. Resistance has plummeted the past 2-3 years. Awareness of what is possible comes from all the announcements the past few weeks and perhaps from MOOCs like the Blackboard one and these blog posts. I think Week 3 of the MOOC will have articles that address many of your questions. And these articles came out from 1998 to 2008. The ideas are not just from 2011 or 2012 like some believe. In fact, decades of research and instructional experimentation underly each idea for Week 3 (on creative and critical thinking and cooperative learning). The networks today simply make those ideas more salient, exploitable, and commonly discussable.
The shift has been happening since (or even before) hypermedia days of the 1980s and early 1990s. This is no sudden shift. What is sudden is that those of us in ed psych and ed tech who have been parading such ideas and movements have been heartily joined by engineers from MIT, business professors from Harvard, religion profs from Notre Dame, English lit people and poets from places like Yale, public health folks from Tufts and Johns Hopkins, etc. There is not much really knew here. What is new is the discussion, the acceptance, the reflection of what is effective teaching on a massive scale, and the players making the news.
The questions discussed at the end of the edX video from Harvard and MIT people (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA6ELdIRkRU) are the same ones my students and I have been asking in my learning theories class for decades as well as my instructional strategies class and my emerging learning technologies class (all of which I first taught in 1989 or 1990). I think two decades is long enough to wait for the revolution to arrive. Much to discuss I think.
When revolutions come faster than organizations wish to change, we find ourselves in interesting times. 😉
Hi, Nancy – I agree that the networked learning experience is not the one ultimate destination of pedagogical theory/educational practice. And that as almost always with any educational innovation, the opportunity here is not to “jump on the bandwagon” but to reexamine assumptions, expand awareness of possibilities, test ideas, and create stronger conceptual models and examples of sound practice for various learning contexts.
And Curt, I agree that there is much within the networked learning model (if it is sufficiently defined at this point to call it a model … maybe “concept” is more appropriate) that resonates with elements of educational theory & practice that predate the prevalence of networked technologies: from the various flavors of cooperative learning, constructivism, constructionism, situated learning, communities of practice, etc.
I do think, though, that much of this is still flying well below the radar of the average educator – especially in higher education. And there is thus both an opportunity and a danger when the explosion into wider consciousness of “what is a MOOC” or “what is networked learning” is all about the Courseras and EdXs.
So for those of us who see ourselves as educational change agents & facilitators, the questions as always are all about living with – not resolving, as Nancy wisely points out above – the creative tensions that seem only to magnify as the spectrum of pedagogical practice widens.
Sure, James, we do not want to simply reify the talking head…the lecture…with a shared online video. Sure, talking heads can change lives and they have (mine included…my life, though perhaps not my head). But there is an opportunity now to do much more than that. An opportunity for intense interaction, social perspective taking and social cognitive change, and increased levels of student control and empowerment in the content. MIT and Harvard and Coursera are providing new methods for instructors to share their knowledge and intellectual capital. Self-paced learning and self-study is one way to learn and perhaps 20-30 percent of the population can succeed that way. But not all.
You are right that social networking models of learning may offer different opportunities than those that Brown University brought us 20+ years ago with Intermedia (hypermedia) or that Aspects brought us (with shared document collaboration) and similar with PrepEditor from Carnegie Mellon U at roughly the same time. Or BBN Slate. Or DIScourse from the Daedalus at Austin or ScreenShare or Timbuktu or a whole slew of other such technologies of the early 1990s. These were stand alone tools for small groups of people to collaborate in interesting ways or, the case of Carbon Copy, to more simply share their screens. At the same time, many of those systems (which we studied back in the day) offer much more power in terms of interactions, connections, global education, etc., than educators of today are aware of.
Today, the Web is the giant connector. Much more is possible and we do need better ways to wrap our heads around it. But, as you say, many people are first being made aware of it. The more interesting tools and systems of today include Piazza (https://piazza.com/), Open Study (http://openstudy.com/), Course Networking (http://coursenetworking.com/), and similar tools.
Given the poor track record higher education (and K-12 education and corporate training) had with the innovative tools for collaboration and social interchange from the 1980s and 90s, I think we should temper our expectations now. Still, there is more buy-in, more experimentation, and the costs of education have gone up. So the time may be ripe for change.
Curt just a quick process note. My blogging system should be automatically approving your posts, but for some reason it is not. So I just want you to know, it has nothing to do with you or your (appreciated) engagement! I’ll try and squash the bug.