Engagement! A tale of two MOOCs

What is the real educational experience of MOOC students? Some people seem to take strong positions on MOOCs without actually having completed one, after just ‘dipping in’. I felt this was not quite enough to judge what MOOC learning is about, so back in August I signed up two MOOCs running almost concurrently. Both were on the Coursera platform and both  – coincidentally – from Weslyan University. Modernism and Postmodernism is 14 weeks long , is still running and Social Psychology at a sprightly – and more normal – six weeks finished recently. I had actually completed a Coursera MOOC at the beginning of the year but as it was on a familiar subject I considered that taking subjects I knew little about would give me a more ‘authentic’ learner experience.

I thought it was important to avoid ‘dip-in-ism’ so I committed to completing both, even paying $40 to go on the Signature Track on the first one. This means Coursera verifies my identity when I submit assignments, both by typing pattern and face recognition. To set up face recognition initially I held my passport in front of the laptop camera and it scanned my photo. For typing recognition a short phrase is tapped out; Coursera now knows what a dismal typist I am.

Both courses were based around an hour or so of weekly video lectures but despite being out of the same stable, they turned out to be very different in design.

Modernism and Postmodernism was/is perhaps most ‘conventional’. Each week there were four to six short video lectures and a couple of original texts as assigned readings. That was it. The videos featured Weslyan president and star lecturer Prof Michael Roth. Most were professionally shot, though sometimes interspersed with lecture capture type clips from some of his classes. What was unexpected here was the quality of the video – although nice – was largely immaterial. The power and engagement was simply in Prof Roth’s remarkable narrative, essentially the story of modern Western thought since the Enlightenment and expressed in the works of Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Darwin, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Woolf and so on, not really a ‘grand narrative’ but a compelling intellectual bricolage. I was genuinely gripped by the story Roth was telling, and sometimes just read the transcripts (much quicker) when I was too busy to watch the video. The eight assessments, 800 word essays, were peer-marked and the twenty or so assignments I have looked at so far in the course are of quite a high academic standard. The peer marking approach is astonishingly valuable, by the way, as the other students usually present the material in a very different way; challenging and reviewing my understanding of that part of the course.

Social Psychology used video differently. The video of the lecturer in was slightly more ‘amateurish’ but the editing was far more sophisticated. Great effort had been taken to get permission to show and edit in some remarkable clips of experiments (including the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment), TED talks, interviews with psychologists and some public broadcasting documentaries. This was supported by chapter-length PDF extracts from major textbooks and reprints of papers. Together this was an astonishingly rich learning resource, the best I have seen on any online course, including many paid-for ones. Like the other course, the tutor voice of Prof Scott Plous was very clear and engaging but his written assignments were more diverse; reactions to an online survey, analysis of a web site and the ‘day of compassion’. The assignments – also peer-marked – were less good than the Modernism course but improved as the ‘drop-ins’ dropped out. The final assignments I read on compassion, from students in India, the Philippines and so on were genuinely moving. The idea that MOOCs encourage a superficial form of learning is misplaced, at least in this case. Participants had evidently reflected, sometimes quite deeply, on the sometimes challenging material.

Engagement and interaction In neither course did I especially follow the discussion threads, they were too fragmented. Social Psychology for example had 200,000 enrolments, 7000 forum posts in the first week and about 8000 students still active at the end. How can you have a ‘conversation’ in that environment? It made me wonder if ‘interaction’ our much-vaunted goal of many online courses is slightly overrated. Much more motivating to me as student was the strength of the narrative, the storyline, a bit like reading a good book in fact. Video proved an excellent way of getting that narrative across and the assignments in both made sure I assimilated at least some of the content and provided an important time frame to ensure I ‘kept up’. This ‘interaction light’ approach seemed to be in contrast with the Open University courses I have done, and indeed tutor on. These are deliberately designed around a series of regular interactions with fellow students and tutors and, being written by a teaching team, have a far less imposing narrative personality. Maybe in the MOOC environment, where ‘classical’ online interaction is necessarily weaker, design may necessarily focus not simply on interaction but engagement and that strong personal narrative may often be a key element. Just ‘dipping into’ a MOOC may completely miss this most important aspect.