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.