Category: Online Higher Education

My initial thoughts on FutureLearn

FutureLearn, and MOOCs in general, have of course been in the news a lot recently so I thought I would put my initial response here for my future record.  This is the response I gave to a colleague…

…Ultimately [it has seemed to me that] a lot of [Higher Education] management don’t ‘get’ the possibilities (especially the scale [the University of] Phoenix and others operate on) and have been slow to support online, others continue to be put off by the eUniversity experience.  That said, when institutions have had a branded offer (Ulster CampusOne for example) student numbers have been low so it might make sense to aggregate even if many institutions will see it only as a way to advertise/sell full courses … the OU might steal a leap and continue to take a bigger share of the pie through Apps and other innovations.

Personally, I think the key question is how many resources will be pooled here.  If it’s limited, they would be better opening up their existing course catalogues and online environments so courses are more discoverable via Google, etc.  The idea of creating a portal which people go to because of perceived quality all seems a bit pre-Google to me.

Jisc has announced they are supporting the idea of this but they are perhaps the only organisation which could encourage proper shared systems and resources.  I remember the JISC conference 6(?) years ago talking about this, in terms of SaaS, so it’s only taken half a decade.

… [Is there a] big fear that tutors would just go off and put something on Alison or build a MOOC – [when] there is a real trade off between reputations, publishing opportunities, salaries/bonuses and most tutors/experts actually enjoying classroom teaching beyond any other bit of their job[?]

Lots of great posts on this elsewhere, including:

  1. Donald Taylor (http://donaldhtaylor.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/what-price-moocs/)
  2. Gavin Henrick (http://www.somerandomthoughts.com/blog/2012/12/21/more-thoughts-on-moocs/)

I would also agree with the ALT members lists which seemed to come to the conclusion that the key element will be how the ‘1.0’ generation of MOOCs are evaluated and lessons learned impact on 2.0.

Final post on my online MSc

If you ever read my last blog, you will have seen various posts about the online MSc course I was working through during the last three years.  You will have also seen that I was not always very positive about the experience.  Thus is it was interesting, just as I was graduating from that course, to see the increase in press coverage for MOOCs and the increasing adoption of ‘free’ online course programmes such as coursera.org.

The major question for me is how, in these course formats, the instructor/tutor role is formed and the level of socialisation with other students.  At times my MSc was limited to working through materials with some discussion board or synchronous chat.  This, to me, is eLearning as has existed for some time and in many ways a replication of a lecture-heavy instructional design.  Indeed accessing static eLearning materials will be familiar to many from the workplace and there are plenty of examples online, including via Alison.

The real value of an educational experience is often the support of experts and your peers in giving a context to your learning.  I fear many large-scale courses are not managing this well.  For example, my recent MOOC experience of Google’s Power Searching with Google MOOC, which contained some good instructional video and useful activities, struggled with a very ‘noisy’ discussion platform.  Do you then start to select entrants, as traditional university courses have, to try and ensure a higher quality experience?  Alternatively do you deliver static materials as a way to advertise what is possible for a fully supported experience, in the form of open course ware rather than open courses.