This week I am meant to be considering whether the MOOC approach could be adopted in my area of teaching. I did a quick scan of FutureLearn and thought about the scene in Education Rita where Rita is asked how to over come staging issues of a particular play, to which she smartly replies 'Put it on the radio' and thought I could offer a similar answer - absolutely it could - because it has been
Good Brain Bad Brain on FutureLearn is a nice example of a neuroscience MOOC. But rather than take the neuroscience approach to a MOOC I thought I could be more creative and consider whether my learning design module or teaching could adopt a MOOC approach. Currently I teach on a 15 point module where I teach students about teaching and they work together to produce a teaching resource, complete with its own VLE. Assessment at present is through a series of blogs, reflections and peer review so I think it would work very well as a MOOC. However, it turns out that learning design is already alive a well on FutureLearn as well. The current course looks so interesting I have actually signed up for it when it next begins in June. So this leads me to my final area which is skills for university study. Unsurprisingly there are lots of MOOCS available in this area as well. The fact that so many MOOCs exist for the areas I teach in does suggest that is perfectly possible to adopt the MOOC approach to what I do but it got me thinking about my work outside academia. I do a fair amount of work with the Education Development Trust working with teachers to conduct research in schools. Now of course there are plenty of MOOCs out there on research methods but I wondered about whether anyone had done a MOOC on neuroeducation and I was quite excited to see that they had not (at least on FutureLearn). If you flick over to my books page you can see that this is an area I write about quite a bit. Having had this realisation the first thing I did was email my co-author on the latest book to see what he thought about the idea and then I started to come up with a list of why a MOOC approach might work well here:
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I have just finished listening to an interview by Martin Weller with George Siemens and Dave Cormier, two pioneers of MOOCs. The interview was very insightful and I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what they had to say but at the very end came the most interesting comment from Dave Cormier when asked what was the future of MOOCs and could they, for example, kill the universities. To paraphrase him, he basically argued that if the aim of the university is to provide content then universities are already dead.
As someone who teaches a range of modules at undergraduate level from a very content heavy first year module on neuroscience to an exploratory content light final year module on learning design, I agree with this statement. However, there are two things that hold me back in being less content focused and more focused on the process of learning and becoming engaged in a discipline in other ways that be useful for later life: i) My own stubbornness as a academic and so-called expert ii) My students - no one has told them this is not about content I am going to comment briefly on each of these beginning with my stubbornness as an academic. When you start teaching often the only thing you have great experience of (even if you have a teaching qualification) is your own experience as a learner and so, when I began teaching in 2004 I was drawing on my own experiences from almost a decade earlier. When I had to first teach about Parkinson's disease I was literally breaking into a cold sweat remembering my own efforts as a learner to understand the circuitry to the basal ganglia. Mastering it (and going on to research it) made me feel that it was a valuable albeit painful exercise and so my own students must endure the same. However, I am not only stubborn in the content I teach but how I teach it. I know, as do most lecturers, that lecturing is a poor relationship of other methods, but I still have high expectations of what my students can learn and what they will do in a lecture. I recently conducted some research into lectures with staff and students and found that both cohorts see them as an opportunity for knowledge acquisition, although staff expect the students to participate more in the lecture. Additionally, the most contact time is in lectures so we dedicate the most direct teaching and learning time to knowledge acquisition - as I type this I question my sanity! Now moving onto the next reason - no one has told the students that their degree is not about content. There are, of course, a huge number of reasons why students come to university expecting to acquire knowledge and the students themselves should not be blamed for this. However, the increase in fees and customer approach we now find ourselves forced to take in higher education means that when students demand information we give it to them. As an example of this, I have just received feedback on a module I teach where I have deliberately reduced lectures and held workshops and given more time for independent study, making it clear the reading should include but not be limited to academic literature. Overall, module feedback is good with ratings given on a scale of 1 to 5, I have scores ranging from 3.8 to 4.9, but one point that is raised each year by one or two students is captured nicely in this year's feedback from a student: "I would want there to be more lectures and more content". This leads me to the related issue of the difference between student-centred learning, of which I am a complete advocate, and student-led learning. To be clear what I mean here, is that we should design learning with the experience of the student at the centre to ensure they gain the most value from the learning experience. However, this is not the same as giving them what they want because sometimes they do not want what is best for their learning - the reliance on module feedback and NSS scores makes universities operate like a customer services desk but the customer - at least in higher education - is not always right. Assuming we do have sufficient pedagogy expertise (and if we don't - we should stop teaching) we should listen to all feedback, look for patterns in that feedback, consider options and change things, only if they align with the goals of what we trying to teach or if we realise we need to amend our goals. We should not just change things for the sake of pleasing students when it goes against the requirements of the programme or leaves them ill-prepared for what comes next. What can we do about this? Well we can clearly get over our own stubbornness and teach for the decade we are in rather than the one we remember formal learning from. By doing this we can be more innovative and I believe in doing so, more successful as teachers. My final year module was by far the most engaging to teach - I learnt more about my students and myself as a teacher when I was less focused on whether the connection from the striatum to the globus pallidus was excitatory or inhibitory. The bigger problem is in addressing student expectations - how can we ensure they see university as about learning beyond learning content. There will will external drivers that support this - reports from big graduate employers for example, but there is also probably things we can do. Two things we can do this is to address student expectations early on in a programme and be very transparent in our pedagogy but there are other ways. I once gave some top tips at the start of a module to my Open University students - the students read the post on the forum and ignored it, ignoring most of the tips as well. At the end of the course, I asked them to give me some tips for next years students, which they did so, plentiful tips largely the same as mine! Interestingly, when I gave these tips to the next cohort explaining last year's group had prepared them for them, they were delighted and commented on how they were going to implement them. So maybe we can use the words and voices of students who have finished their degrees to tell our new arrivals that content is dead - well maybe not dead but just getting on a bit and needs a bit of help around the house. When I first starting working at the Open University as a central academic in 2009, a very experienced colleague described the OU as like an oil tanker - the engines are turned off and it keeps going in the same direction for a few hundred miles. Now I don't know anything about oil tankers but over the coming years I got to know quite a lot about the OU and I understand the analogy to mean that the OU is such a mammoth enterprise that any change takes a very long time to kick in.
It was regularly criticised from within for this slow movement and I once delighted in a professor standing up and proclaiming that 'we either need to shit or get of the pot' when making a decision about summer schools. It turns out we did - shit that is - and the science summer schools were lost to us as part of cuts to make much needed savings. Since that time, various changes have been made to the OU's teaching with more and more material becoming online only and face to face tutorials replaced with online conferencing tools. Each of these changes have pros and cons and I am not going to judge them here. One thing that has remained brilliantly consistent over the last 15 years since I have been involved with the OU is the utter dedication to producing the highest quality teaching materials, which quite frankly put other universities to shame. This process is slow and requires a team effort from numerous academics, managers, editors, artists and graphic designers. The process is articulated beautifully in a recent blog by Claire Kotechi. This blog was written in direct response to some careless, if not utterly stupid comments made by the VC of the Open University, Peter Horrocks, who had the audacity to say that central academics (i.e. the creative academic minds behind all OU courses) did not teach. I say audacity here because he has, as far as I am aware, never taught (his background is at the BBC) and he has therefore not be part of the carefully crafted module production process that OU academics put blood, sweat and tears into on a daily basis. I was visiting the OU not long after the ill-fated comments, which were followed by a half-hearted apology, and discovered that he is facing a vote of no-confidence soon. This vote is not driven by his comments that day but a much longer line of problems and mismanagement that threatens to destroy the university (and some of which stems before his time). And this brings me to my headline thought. Sometimes in times of difficulty, it is easier not to the rock the boat - just to keep going, dig your heals in and do what you do best. For the OU culture, that is producing high quality teaching resources for anyone who wants to learn and I think there is definitely something to be said for this approach. For the OU strategy, however, to not change now would be to continue with a line of cuts and dis-empowering of academic staff. In this case, I think the best thing for the OU is to change it's strategy and maintain its culture. If that strategy means losing a VC, or in the very least having his team change their strategy significant, in order to maintain a team of dedicated teachers, producing high quality teaching material then I think it is about time this oil tanker gets rocked and maybe that rocking can take it back to basics. |