A Principled Approach to the Design of Collaborative MOOC Curricula

Abstract

Abstract. MOOCs have the potential to benefit from the large number of very diverse learners that participate in courses, but this requires a principled approach to MOOC curriculum development. Courses need to take into consideration the diversity of learner experience and intentions, and incorporate scripts that both benefit from the large numbers of learners (crowd-sourcing), as well as enabling small-scale intense collaboration. The real challenge is tying together a set of learning activities and the development of a community knowledge base, with the specific curriculum learning goals of the course. This paper offers a pragmatic approach to developing courses, based on the experience of a MOOC for teacher professional development.

Investigating In-service Elementary School Teachers’ Satisfaction with Participating in MOOC for Teaching Biological Concepts

“…Corresponding satisfaction was reported from the substantial interaction and active participation between peers, result which was confirmed by research of Baran and Alzoubi (2020), Cho and Rathbun (2013). Also important is the finding regarding the satisfaction that the participants received from the collaboration, within the learning community, which contributed to the effective learning of the participants, finding that confirm Håklev and Slotta (2017). Finally, they expressed their desire to participate in similar actions in the future, finding that confirms existing findings of Donitsa-Schmidt and Topaz (2018).…”

“…In this context Donitsa-Schmidt and Topaz (2018) note the general satisfaction of the participants from such a learning experience and their intention to participate in other MOOCs in the future. Borko (2004) and Guskey and Yoon (2009) agree that learning for teachers is a process of participation, practice and collaboration on teaching methods and MOOCs contribute in this direction through a flexible, collaborative and constructive process (Håklev & Slotta, 2017;Kennedy & Laurillard, 2019). The benefits of participation in this type of professional development programs are its usually free offer, the access they provide to OER, the creation of learning communities and the issuance of a certificate, which sometimes validates the acquisition of qualifications by the participants.…”

What We Learned When We Compared Discussion Posts from One MOOC Hosted on Two Platforms

“…Although some early MOOC designs (i.e., cMOOCs) promoted collectivist approaches and constructivist pedagogies (c.f., Downes, 2009), the xMOOC model is by far the most dominant type of MOOC, and its associated pedagogies (i.e., transfer-oriented, self-paced) are reinforced by platform affordances. While some design efforts have been made to create opportunities for deep learning in large-scale, open access learning environments through the advancement of community-oriented instructional models (c.f., Quintana et al, 2020;Håklev & Slotta, 2017), these efforts have largely focused on pedagogical decisions within the course, including careful placement of instructional items within a course sequence (Quintana & Tan, 2021), development of co-dependent activity structures (Emmanuel & Lamb, 2017), and creation of effective participant structures (Quintana et al, 2020). Since MOOC discussion forums remain the primary mode of learner-to-learner interaction within at scale learning environments, more research is needed to understand how learners use platform affordances to respond to discussion prompts and to engage with peers.…”

CKBiology: An Active Learning Curriculum Design for Secondary Biology

“…Recent work in secondary school contexts has extended beyond single curricular units to entail full course designs, including courses in Grade 12 Health Science (Serevetas, 2017) as well as the current work in Grade 12 Biology (Slotta and Acosta, 2017). Similarly, KCI research in higher educational contexts has included full course designs in preservice teacher education (Slotta and Najafi, 2013), business and media (Ehrlick and Slotta, 2017), as well as a Massive Open Online Course for in-service teachers (Håklev and Slotta, 2017).…”