Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space bet... more Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space between formal online courses and informal learning. Adopting measures used with formal online courses to assess the outcomes of MOOCs is often not informative because the context is very different. The particular affordances of MOOCs shaping learning environments comprise both scale (in terms of numbers of students) and diversity (in terms of the types of students). As learning designers we focus on understanding the particular tools and pedagogical affordances of the MOOC platform to support learner engagement. Drawing on research into learner engagement conducted in the broader field of online learning, we consider how learner engagement in a MOOC might be designed for by looking at three pedagogical aspects: teacher presence, social learning and peer learning.
The University of Cape Town offers a co-curricular Global Citizenship programme providing student... more The University of Cape Town offers a co-curricular Global Citizenship programme providing students with opportunities to engage critically with contemporary global debates and reflect on issues of citizenship and social justice. The required learning activities include writing blog posts on the course site, participating in voluntary community service and creating small campaigns on campus. While there is enthusiastic engagement with activities, it remains challenging to monitor and assess student participation. Additionally these learning experiences are sufficiently different to academic courses and students observe the difficulties they have had in knowing what is being required of them. Over the past four years we have developed an online learning environment for the programme and now needed to consider a redesign. An emerging strategy to acknowledge skills and achievements that are developed through informal learning involves the use of badges and related gamification ideas. Ba...
MOOCs offer opportunities but are also pose the danger of further exacerbating existing education... more MOOCs offer opportunities but are also pose the danger of further exacerbating existing educational divisions and deepening the homogeneity of global knowledge systems. Like many universities globally, South African university leaders and those responsible for course, curriculum, and learning technology development are coming to grips with the implications and possibilities of online and open education for their own institutions. What opportunities do they offer to universities, especially from the point of view of research-focused campus-based institutions which have not yet engaged with MOOCs and have little history with online courses? Given the complexities of the MOOC-scape, this paper provides a means for contextualising the options within an institutional landscape of educational provision as possibilities for MOOC creation, use and adaptation. This takes into account what is currently available and identifies what new opportunities can be explored. Refining this further, a categorisation of existing MOOCs is provided that maps to broad institutional interests. The notion of courses offered by universities as being either primarily 'inward' or 1 Laura Czerniewicz is an associate professor in the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town. She has been heading the university's open education and open scholarship initiative OpenUCT for the past three years, (http://openuct.uct.ac.za). She has worked in education in a variety of roles for many years including as a teacher, teacher trainer, researcher, advocate and educational publisher.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space bet... more Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space between formal online courses and informal learning. Adopting measures used with formal online courses to assess the outcomes of MOOCs is often not informative because the context is very different. The particular affordances of MOOCs shaping learning environments comprise both scale (in terms of numbers of students) and diversity (in terms of the types of students). As learning designers we focus on understanding the particular tools and pedagogical affordances of the MOOC platform to support learner engagement. Drawing on research into learner engagement conducted in the broader field of online learning, we consider how learner engagement in a MOOC might be designed for by looking at three pedagogical aspects: teacher presence, social learning and peer learning.
The University of Cape Town offers a co-curricular Global Citizenship programme providing student... more The University of Cape Town offers a co-curricular Global Citizenship programme providing students with opportunities to engage critically with contemporary global debates and reflect on issues of citizenship and social justice. The required learning activities include writing blog posts on the course site, participating in voluntary community service and creating small campaigns on campus. While there is enthusiastic engagement with activities, it remains challenging to monitor and assess student participation. Additionally these learning experiences are sufficiently different to academic courses and students observe the difficulties they have had in knowing what is being required of them. Over the past four years we have developed an online learning environment for the programme and now needed to consider a redesign. An emerging strategy to acknowledge skills and achievements that are developed through informal learning involves the use of badges and related gamification ideas. Ba...
MOOCs offer opportunities but are also pose the danger of further exacerbating existing education... more MOOCs offer opportunities but are also pose the danger of further exacerbating existing educational divisions and deepening the homogeneity of global knowledge systems. Like many universities globally, South African university leaders and those responsible for course, curriculum, and learning technology development are coming to grips with the implications and possibilities of online and open education for their own institutions. What opportunities do they offer to universities, especially from the point of view of research-focused campus-based institutions which have not yet engaged with MOOCs and have little history with online courses? Given the complexities of the MOOC-scape, this paper provides a means for contextualising the options within an institutional landscape of educational provision as possibilities for MOOC creation, use and adaptation. This takes into account what is currently available and identifies what new opportunities can be explored. Refining this further, a categorisation of existing MOOCs is provided that maps to broad institutional interests. The notion of courses offered by universities as being either primarily 'inward' or 1 Laura Czerniewicz is an associate professor in the Centre for Higher Education Development at the University of Cape Town. She has been heading the university's open education and open scholarship initiative OpenUCT for the past three years, (http://openuct.uct.ac.za). She has worked in education in a variety of roles for many years including as a teacher, teacher trainer, researcher, advocate and educational publisher.
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Papers by Janet Small