Tutoring a MOOC? What's that like?

Something interesting happened this week! Upon waking up and peeking my head out of the covers to another cold and rainy Melbourne morning, I did the usual thing: Found my phone, tucked my head beneath the blankets and began trawling through social media and email updates. Being connected means living and working within different times zones. My supervisor is overseas and I have colleagues in America... when Australia sleeps the rest of my network is awake and communicating.

So, on this morning I woke up to an email asking me to tutor a MOOC. If you're a reader of this blog, you'll have heard about Planet Earth... and You! organised by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through Coursera. I've been writing about my online learning journey which started off as a way to learn about the context in which I'm doing my PhD study. I'm interested in students' use of digital technologies in Earth Science, specifically Geology. Not knowing much about Geology and working full time, there was no way that I could audit a first year course in daylight hours. So I turned to the MOOC.

Just recently I've read Audrey Watters' The Monsters of Education Technology. Watters is critical of MOOCs, and I agree with many of her assertions. In discussing learning on the web, she brings up an interesting point that I'd like to explore here and connect with my recent invitation:

Learning on the Web means the intellectual relationship isn't restricted to student and content. The relationship isn't only among student, content and instructor. The exchange isn't about a student demonstrating to an instructor that content has been "successfully delivered" and processed. Learning on the Web opens that intellectual exchange up in new ways. Authority, expertise, participation, voice - these can be so different on the programmable web; not so with programmed instruction. (p. 104)

What is programmed instruction? Here's a video of B.F. Skinner who coined the phrase. He's explaining his teaching machines.

If we think about MOOCs in terms of programmed instruction, I think that we're denying the learner a sense of agency he or she can assert in the online learning environment. What does it mean to be a learner in the online environment and what identities do we bring to this environment that are distinct from those that might be exposed inside the walls of a classroom? How do our identities change as we engage - or disengage - with the content and the lived experience of the MOOC?

I don't think that presenting a lecture as a video and getting students to watch it on the tram as they travel to and from school will solve their problems. What I'm thinking about is the tacit learning that can happen that may not be primary intention for taking a MOOC. Over the course of 7 months, I've completed 2 and have just started a third. I set out to learn about Geology, but from the posts here and conversations with peers, I've learned more than content.

For the most part, I've reflected on what it means to be a learner in the MOOC environment and the affordances MOOCs offer the teacher as learner. I don't have the time or the space to go into all this here, but I want to go back to the Watters quote above in which online learning can open the exchange in new ways. I've had the experience of being a teacher and university lecturer/tutor what intrigued me about the email was that I had never done these things online. What does it mean to tutor online? How will this be different from my past experiences? And will there be unique affordances in this endeavour?

It was with these questions that I submitted my application to become a tutor in Planet Earth... and You! If all goes well, you can expect more of this journey in this space and if you've gotten this far in the post, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Harnessing Technology to Promote Growth

A couple of months ago, this started happening:

The numbness began in cold weather. At first, only 1 or 2 fingers were affected. Then it began happening more often and, at times, 4 fingers on one hand were as white as a ghost. Naturally, I posted it on Facebook and asked if any of my other 30-something friends had similar experiences.

Within an hour, a paediatric cardiologist in Taiwan had diagnosed it as something called Raynaud's phenomenon. A high school friend from Canada said she has it and offered her doctor's advice. Of course, I turned to Google to find out what I could and quickly forgot about it until the next time it happened.

My mum, also a Facebook friend, didn't forget about it. In her imagination, with the help of ill informed Google searches, the numbness was caused by something malignant... tiny chemical machines hijacking my circulatory system to do something more sinister in other parts of my body.

Slightly disturbed and mostly to get my mum to stop nagging me - Internet: a nagging enabler for mothers half way around the world - I went to the doctor. To make a long story short, I explained what was happening and what I thought it was. He agreed and when I asked him what I could do, he turned to the computer and Googled it. Here was the advice I received and my thoughts left unvoiced:

1. Get a warm pair of gloves. Thank you, Captain Obvious!
2. When you go home, Google Raynaud's phenomenon. Pick the first site from the list, that'll be the Mayo Clinic, and read about it. Actually, I already did that... AND NO, the Mayo Clinic probably won't be the first website that comes up. 

Why am I writing about a personal health issue on my Ed Tech blog? Haven't we all used the Internet to self diagnose or prepare us for a visit to the doctor or dentist? With Google regularly playing a part in our lives and in our students' homework regimes I feel it's important to think about teaching students to harness technology to promote growth.

Dewey (1938) writes about growth in Experience and Education. Growth can take different directions and not only develops us physically but intellectually and morally. Here, I'm going to focus on intellectual development. For Dewey, there are 3 types of experiences: educational, noneducational and miseducational. Eisner (2002, p.37) summarises these:

• Educational experiences increase ability to secure meaning and to act in ways that are instrumental to the achievement of inherently worthwhile ends

• Noneducational experiences are simply undergone and have no significant effect on the individual one way or another

• Miseducational experiences thwart or hamper our ability to have further experiences or to cope intelligently with problems                                                                  

If every experience influences in some degree the objective conditions under which further experiences are had' (Dewey, 1938, p. 37), I wonder what this means for the experiences students' have when using search engines to find information related to their school work, curiosities or problems.

Take, for example, the situation described above. Using Facebook to reach my network of professional friends I had an educational experience. My more knowledgable friends helped me understand what might be going on. My life experience working in a chemistry lab and being acquainted with the Mayo Clinic added to the educational experience while I was sifting through the sites Google brought to my attention. This history allowed me to navigate the web as someone who could be agentive in discussing my health concerns and developing a strategy to address the condition with the doctor. Had he been more adept at his job and I more vocal a more successful outcome would've resulted. Needless to say, I'm getting a second opinion.

That's my story and it was shaped by my 30-plus years and unique experiences. What if a high school student had a similar query? Sure, high school students aren't new to using search engines, but what kind of experiences do search engines lend them when they're told just Google it? When students aren't taught how to effectively use search engines or how the algorithms work to filter information that may or may not be personally relevant, the experiences they have can range from educational to miseducational. 

What if that young person didn't have the ability to navigate the networked public of the Internet like an informed, technologically savvy adult? What if that young person didn't have the support network of a concerned parent or guardian to follow up? The experiences young people have in schooling should be those that set them up for future educational experiences so they can make informed decisions. Watters (2014) says '... more often than not, we still lasso technology for the more traditional purposes and practices of education: for content delivery' (p. 99). With this in mind it is time for a reconceptualisation of the content that we're 'delivering.'