Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013 Degrees of Openness in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) Michael Totschnig E-Learning Consultant eMadrid, 17th of May 2013
Jul 08, 2015
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Degrees of Openness in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
Michael TotschnigE-Learning Consultant
eMadrid, 17th of May 2013
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
About me
● PhD in Communication from Université du Québec à Montréal
● Active in E-Learning R&D since 2005 – WU Wien
● LMS (Learn@WU), Authoring Tools, E-Learning Standards
– KnowledgeMarkets● Learning Object Repository (EducaNext, Bildungspool Austria)
– Econtent+ project Icoper● Outcome-oriented education (OICS)
– Hasso-Plattner-Institute● MOOC (openHPI)
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Context for this talk
● Based on the experience as coordinator for openHPI, a platform for xMOOCs
● Evaluation presented at Educon 2013 (with Franka Grünewald, Christian Willems, Ralf Teusner and Elnaz Mazandarani)
● Interested in the pedagogical, technical, social innovations of cMOOCs
● Inspired by Fischer's theory of “culture of participation” and “meta-design” (thanks to Franka Grünewald)
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Outline
● Definitions of Openness in cMOOCs and xMOOCs
● Experience with openHPI (xMOOC)● Cultures of participation● Design guidelines● Conclusions:
– Technical: From LMS to SOA
– Conceptual: Beyond the c/x dichotomy
MOOC – A New and Successful Trend in E-Learning
■ What happens when courses traditionally taught to members of an educational institution are offered online and opened (accessible without cost and preconditions). They can attract a massive world-wide audience.
■ Expected Consequences– Content will be scrutinized massively and can be improved through
suggestions
– Participants will help each other solve problems and create vibrant communities
– Learning analytics will allow to gain deeper understanding of learning processes
– Competition between educational providers will motivate improvements
– Economies of scale allow to decrease cost and increase quality
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OPEN
● Open Access !: free of cost and free of preconditions
● Open Content ? Can the content be reused as Open Educational Resources ?
● Open Source ? Is the system open to experimentation ?
● Open Space? Where are the Boundaries ?
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Boundaries of the learning eventxMOOC cMOOC
Temporal fixed Potentially unlimited
Cultural One dominant voice Polyphonic
Organizational One institution in the center Network of institutions and invididuals
Technical Monolithic system Aggregation of tools
Domain Definite and independent Infinite and connected
Knowledge Theoretical content Situated context, process
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
MOOCs and social learning
● Social software as „the ability to speak into the context others have created“ (Siemens and Tittenberger)
● Learning spaces as stages for the orchestration of learning activities in specific roles as individuals, groups, communities
● Are these roles prescribed by the system or open for experimentation?
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
openHPI● hosted at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam (HPI),
Germany● Courses in English and German
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OpenHPI: Technical Platform
● Based on CanvasLMS (Open Source LMS written in RubyOnRails)
● Private cloud infrastructure behind LoadBalancer
● Video streaming from Vimeo
openHPI – Course Format● Course content is split into 6 units
● Each unit is taught during one consecutive course week
● Learning material provided during a week consists of
– sequences of lecture recordings,
– self tests and weekly homework
– additional reading materials,
– dedicated discussion forums.
● Final exam is held in seventh course week
● Cumulated result of homework and final exam decides upon reception of openHPI certificate
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Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
openHPI courses
● In-Memory Data Management, Prof. Hasso Plattner. 13,126 registrations, 2,137 certificates
● Internetworking mit TCP/IP, Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel, 9,891 registrations, 1,635 certificates
● Semantic Web Technologies, Dr. Harald Sack, 5,692 registrations, 784 certifactes
● Datenmanagement mit SQL, Prof. Dr. Felix Naumann, currently 6478 registrations
● Web-Technologien, Prof. Dr. Christoph Meinel
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OpenHPI: insights on community management
● Leave questions unanswered for at least one day in order to allow student engament
● Answer questions that remain unanswered for 3-5 days in order to prevent student dissatisfaction
● Do not tolerate any dismissive behavior or bad manners. React friendly, but determined
● Self-regulative community: Users react to offenses and protect the teaching team
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
OpenHPI: degrees of participation
● Inactive● Passive● Reacting● Acting● Supervising / supporting
OpenHPI: Emergence of additional user types● Domain expert: active when his domain of expertise is the current course
topic; gives high quality answers and points out possible mistakes in the teaching material (including errata)
● Contributing user:
– provision of very detailed solutions to homework on private websites, where the sample solution of the teaching team was not detailed enough for all learners.
– implementation and distribution of tools for the solution of exercises with algorithmic or mathematical nature.
– generation and allocation of audio files.
– discussion triggers initiated by students.
● Users switch between roles and become active in specific contexts
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Culture of participation and Meta-Design
● Concepts suggested by Gerhard Fischer● active participation and empowerment of a subject● Design guidelines for participative communities● „conceptualize, create, and evolve socio-technical environments
that not only technically enable and support users’ participation, but also successfully encourage it.“
G. Fischer. “Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation”. interactions, vol. 80, no. 3, 2011, pp. 42-53.
Gerhard Fischer and Elisa Giaccardi: Meta-Design: A Framework for the Future of End-User Development. In: In Lieberman, H., Paternò, F., Wulf, V. (Eds) (2004) End User Development - Empowering People to Flexibly Employ Advanced
Information and Communication Technology,:
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Roles in a culture of participation
Source: Grünewald et. al.: openHPI - a Case-Study on the Emergence of two Learning Communities. Educon 2013
Design guidelines I: Support different levels of engagement
● 0: allow incremental discovery of the system● 1: allow peripheral participation● 2: give incentives for contributions (users are
responsible for knowledge construction) ● 3: grant privileges to highly involved
participants● 4: allow experiments that extend, transcend the
system
Design guidelines II: Support human-problem interaction
● Multiple choice questions assess remembering and understanding (referring to Blooms taxonomy)
● hands-on exercises allow much deeper practical involvement (application, analysis, evaluation)
● Exercises linked to concrete experience● Challenges that require creativity
Design guidelines III: Underdesign for emergent behaviour
● “allow the “owners of problems” to create the solutions themselves at use time” (Fischer)
● Encourage negotiation and discussion opportunities via channels internal and external to the system
● Allow connections to external tools (social networks, personal learning environments, e-portfolio systems)
Design guidelines IV: Reward and recognize contributions
● Support „social capital, reputation economies and gift cultures“
● Stackoverflow Q&A model:– Questions, answers and comments can be up-
and down-voted
– Users earn points and badges
Design guidelines VI: Co-evolution of artefacts and the community
● „Support the mutual cross-polination between the evolution of the communities and the resources for system developments“
● Community ownership● Seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding
(SER) model
Seeding, evolutionary growth, and reseeding (SER) model
Seed: „collection of domain knowledge that is designed to evolve at use time.“Evolutionary Growth: „users focus on solving a specific problem and creating problem-specific information“Reseeding: organize the contributions into a coherent whole, create a new seed
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Conclusions: Technical
● From monolithic LMS to distributed SOA● Re-use state-of the art backend services
where available and scalable● Provide APIs that enables community-
developped clients for heterogenous client environments and integration with third-party tools (PLE, social networks) and external learning facilities
Michael Totschnig, 17. Mai 2013
Conclusions: Conceptual
cMOOC and xMOOC not as dualistic opposition, but as challenge for creating underdesigned systems that encourage participation, experimentation and creativity