A brainy Mooc

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:

• Teachers are ridiculously busy people - that idea of a 6 week summer holiday is a myth (my mum was a teacher and we spent at least two weeks in the classroom sorting and planning for the next year and she spent many more weeks doing the same at home on the kitchen table). This means they need flexibility to dip in and out but they also bring a huge wealth of experience to the table meaning they can construct the content with you (if I have time one day I will write about how I almost got lynched by a group of teachers in a misunderstanding about learning - turns out it is neuroscientists and teachers view this quite differently).
• There are a lot of teachers and a big enthusiasm to learn about neuroscience and that means you have the potential to be MASSIVE
• Most teachers have sufficient digital skills to manage a MOOC, they might not be regular bloggers but they might tweet, use facebook and can certainly find their way around a website which means they can cope with the ONLINE part.
• You only have to turn on the radio or TV once in a while and you will be aware of the constraints on our education system - cost cutting all over the shop but that does not mean teachers should not benefit from decent learning experiences themselves and because they are experts in teaching they will no doubt bring insights in to how to the MOOC could look in future years - they are a brilliant audience to teach and learn from with an OPEN model.

I have never had the opportunity to work on a MOOC before (although I may be about to start in my day job) but there is certain appeal to doing this for something completely different. I don't want to just re-version my face to face teaching into a MOOC - I know I would be constrained by what I already know from the face to face experience. I want to do something more creative and the best designs are the more creative ones.  To me MOOCs offer a way to be creative without the constraints of university module approval processes and fitting into an overall programme of study - they offer the instructor the same openness they offer the learner. This is possibly the views of an idealistic novice but if you cannot be idealistic at the start of a learning curve - when can you?