Thinking about MOOCs: A Link Round-Up

As part of Vanderbilt’s Coursera partnership, I’ve been working this fall to help the half-dozen Coursera faculty here design and build their spring courses. Since teaching online at this scale is new territory for higher education, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring this educational space with my graduate assistant, Katie McEwen. By the time the Coursera announcement was made back on September 19th, Katie and I had created a 45-page Coursera resource guide detailing common and uncommon teaching practices used by the courses then available on the Coursera platform.

Since September, Katie and I have both been blogging about teaching and learning in and with MOOCs, and I wanted to make sure I directed the attention of readers of this blog to some of those blog posts, most of which have run on the Center for Teaching (CFT) blog. Katie’s posts over on the CFT website have thus far focused on the nuts and bolts of Coursera, with explanatory posts on video lectures, video discussions, and assessments. (She’ll be tackling peer grading in her next post.) Meanwhile, I’ve blogged here and on the CFT site about Coursera’s role as an innovation accelerator, about considering a MOOC as something of a super-textbook, and about four different contexts in which students might take a MOOC as part of an on-campus, credit-bearing course.

Also this fall, the CFT is hosting a visiting scholar, law professor Catherine Easton of Lancaster University in the UK. Catherine is in the United States as part of the International Scholars Program of the UK’s Higher Education Academy (HEA). She’s here to study classroom response systems (“clickers”) and related technologies, although she’s developed a healthy interest in MOOCs since arriving. She and I have started identifying some connections between the use of clickers in face-to-face classes and the use of multiple-choice questions embedded in the online lecture videos common on Coursera. See her blog post for more on this idea.

I’m hoping to do a little more writing on this topic over winter break, starting with a few ideas for applying the social pedagogies lens to student activities within a MOOC. I hope that those of you interested in MOOCs will read some of the posts I’ve mentioned here–and that you find them useful as you consider how MOOCs might affect teaching and learning in higher education.

Image: “Don’t Chain Me Down,” Wendell, Flickr (CC)

Andy Saltarelli says:

December 17, 2012 at 5:45 pm

Thanks for the… links 🙂

I’m wondering about what, if any, work you all did in the CFT around gauging faculty readiness for these alternate course delivery methods (of which I would consider MOOCs being the most extreme example). As could have been the case with Vandy, a very similar initiative at my institution is coming swiftly from the top with limited faculty input. Faculty development is very much an afterthought, if it’s a thought at all. We’re wondering how to understand perceptions of and readiness for such changes so that we can better direct our programming and facilitate conversations that, for lack of a better phrase, respect and engage both “sides.” Thus, we’re looking at quick-and-dirty surveys as well as focus groups/conversations or even a quick FLC.

Thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks Derek!
-Andy

Derek Bruff says:

December 31, 2012 at 1:00 pm

That’s a great question, Andy. About 12 months ago, our Chancellor formed a committee to explore how Vanderbilt might use digital technologies in service of its teaching, research, and service missions. I was fortunate to be on that committee, and we spent about four months scanning the current technology landscape here at Vanderbilt. For a couple of our colleges and schools, that scan involved faculty surveys, although the response rates to those surveys were fairly low. Still, I think we were able to get a good sense of faculty perspectives on the use of current and emerging educational technologies. And we were able to brainstorm some promising paths for the university to take in this space.

Meanwhile, the University went ahead with the Coursera partnership. I can’t say that the committee’s work greatly informed that decision, but it certainly helped me and the other members of the Coursera task force in our implementation of that decision. And my being on that task force has led to a number of productive conversations on these issues with faculty and administrators around campus. These conversations have, thus far, been informal and ad hoc, although the Center is planning a “Conversation on Teaching” this spring on MOOCs that will be open to the entire campus.

We’ve not done any kind of formal needs assessment of our faculty here at the Center in a long while. I know that some teaching centers use surveys and other tools for such needs assessments, but we find that our numerous one-on-one consultations with faculty and conversations with department chairs and program directors provide us a good sense of the needs of our faculty. We might be overestimating our understanding of faculty perspectives, of course, but we’ve found this less-structured form of needs assessment to work well for us. And so we’re taking a similar approach when it comes to MOOCs and related topics. These topics come up in just about every conversation I have with faculty and administrators (and students for that matter), so I feel like I have a pretty good read on the situation.

MOOCs (Part 1 of 2) | Alphachimp University says:

February 26, 2013 at 10:20 am

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