Thinking about MOOCs

If you are new to reading this blog, I am writing it to help me with my thoughts for a PhD study on students' perceptions of their use of technology in formal education. I am also working while doing the PhD so it is a little difficult to be engaged in the university setting during the day.

About a month ago I took my first MOOC - massive open online course - offered by coursera.org. I decided to take Planet Earth... And You! It was offered by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign coincidentally where one of my favourite qualitative research writers, Robert Stake, is also based. At the start of the course there were 28,000 people enrolled and I was excited by the different forms of engagement the online environment would offer. These included:

• Video lectures
• Quizzes
• Assignments
• Practical Activities
• Discussion Boards
• Student-to-student Assessment

I have to admit I enrolled for 2 reasons. Firstly, although I am a trained Science teacher, my knowledge in the field of Geology isn't a strength. I grew up in Ontario and despite having an excellent reputation for secondary education I can't remember much about my lessons in Geology. Unlike Biology, Chemistry and Physics, Geology wasn't offered at the senior high school level when I went to school and to be honest, I'm not sure that I would've taken it! The second reason follows the first, as a Science teacher in Australia, I am expected to deliver lessons in Geology! So, I signed up and logged in. 

The research on MOOCs suggests that perhaps only 1 in 10 students will complete their online course. For me, these numbers encouraged me to stick with it and try to learn how I might employ some of the online engagement strategies to my very real classroom. I won't focus on video lessons, you can see heaps of these by other educators on YouTube. I even have a daggy channel, too. 

I took away some lessons from Planet Earth that I would like to share with you:

1. Practical Activities
2. Discussion Boards
3. Student-to-student Assessment

Practical Activities: The course took us all over the world to study earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics and resources. As a teacher passionate about the regular use of pracs, I wondered how this would work online. We were provided with Google Earth files and data to take us to interesting formations on the Earth's surface. There, we took measurements, made observations, and used the data to make conclusions about what happened and will happen to these places over time. This was the part of the course that I liked the best! I was sceptical at first, but it opened my understanding to how Geology can be made very real by utilising a free software to travel virtually while employing the scientific method to complete the pracs. 

There are many programs that offer virtual experiments, but I think that as teachers we need to ask ourselves whether these are just a replacement for getting the equipment out and having students actually do the experiments. The Planet Earth staff designed the practical work in such a way that the technology was used to enhance our understanding and furthered our knowledge in an environment that would otherwise be inaccessible to learners. I have heard teachers lament that the only prac we can do in Geology is the Mohs scratch test... Not anymore! 

Discussion Boards: The 5 week course had a weekly discussion board that students needed to contribute to. I'll admit, I didn't really have the time to spend the allocated 2 hours on these, but that's not to say that I didn't learn anything from them. I participated every week, but what I needed to do as a learner was to participate earlier so that my posts could have been read and responded to. The discussions focused around debate style questions such as whether we should continue to use fossil fuels as usual or whether we would advise people living around a volcano to evacuate or not. I found that these types of questions allowed the learner to position themselves in the topic by providing them  a forum to showcase what they had learned but also to assume the role of a stakeholder. Learners had the opportunity to respond creatively to these prompts and my observations showed that many did!

I see potential for these types of discussions to happen in and outside my classroom online. By using something private like a GoogleDoc to do this, my students could make similar contributions to our collective knowledge or perhaps begin a project to structure discussion for debate preparation that would be enacted during class. 

Student-to-student Assessment: While taking Planet Earth, I was surprised that we were called on to grade the discussion posts from our peers. For 2 weeks, we needed to grade the work of 5 peers and ourselves. We were provided with a rubric and could choose to make comments on others' work. For the first week, I had heaps of marking for my own job. I graded the work, but didn't offer any comments... I admit when I received my peer graded work, I felt excited to see comments of encouragement and constructive criticism. I also felt a little guilty that I hadn't spent the time to encourage my peers in the same way! The next week, I spent more time on my peers' work and felt another sense of satisfaction by hopefully giving my peers the same encouragement. 

In the end, I not only learned heaps about Geology, I also learned about some interesting pedagogical approaches that I will build on in the future. I still feel a little apprehensive about teaching Geology, but I have come to appreciate that learning together is very powerful. This is something that I try to encourage my students to do... Funny how practicing what you preach is a little confronting.

Always looking for something to procrastinate with, I have signed up for another MOOC offered by courser.org: The Dynamic Earth: A Course for Educators. I'm looking forward to starting on Monday!