a couple of caveats, and they’re not in the slides, but I do want to bring these out, because George (Siemens) mentioned them a bit. One of the caveats is the idea of education as solving mobility problems, social problems, employment problems, poverty problems, and I think it works the other way around. I don’t see education as being the means to solve these problems. I don’t think it’s an automatic thing. I know it’s a really good selling point for education generally and online learning in particular, but I don’t think that the root of social problems lies in a lack of education, and I don’t think that the solution will be there.
I think education creates ways of seeing, ways of doing, ways of becoming that are not possible otherwise. And these are the things that make a life worth living and make a person willing to work more diligently and more forcefully toward having that life.
the idea of the Massive Open Online Course, and the theory of connectivism that George coined the title for and that George and I and Dave (Cormier) and a whole pile of other people have worked together to create, is largely about self-education, is largely about how we create our own learning. And I think a big part of that has to be why we create our own learning, why we educate ourselves, what are the motivations here.
There’s this thing about education being what is needed in order to get jobs. As though there’s enough jobs at the end of it. And I think that’s a fallacy. People respond - and this happens in our country - they respond to the doctor shortage by educating more doctors. They say, “this will solve the problem!” But they don’t create new doctor positions. And so we’ve educated a hundred doctors and still have a doctor shortage after because nobody’s paying for doctors.
George made some interesting comments about disruption in education and was saying that some of the new programs, the new initiatives like Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and others, are not disruptive enough. I think he’s got that right. And what we’ve tried to create with the massive open online course is something that is, as he said, transformative, something that takes what we know of as education, sets it aside, and rebuilds it for a world that is dramatically changed, complex, changing, difficult to understand, difficult to comprehend, difficult to work in. And what we’ve created is called the MOOC, the Massive Open Online Course.
Probably the major defining feature of the MOOC, and certainly the place where we started, is the fact that it is open. Anybody can enter a MOOC.
but what we built is a type of online learning. And it requires a certain infrastructure.
Openness also means that novices and experienced people are able to merge together in the same space and communicate and interact with each other. It is this directness, this immediacy of communication, that you can do online that allows a MOOC to be open, that is one of its defining features.
The MOOC is structured as a network. And all of these websites are connected through the mechanisms of the MOOC. As George said, it looks like the web. It is the web. And we use different technologies to bridge the gap between these individual websites.
The MOOC is also about aggregating or bringing things together. Not to unite them into being one single unified thing, it’s like George said with the crowds, right? We don’t want 100 people in the room to all come to the same belief, but we do want the 100 people in the room to each come up with their own beliefs, but then bring them all together.
That’s the old way, right? That’s school the way it used to be, where the authority at the front of the room will present you with the content you must have and then you absorb it and remember it. But what this is like is an entire society talking together. And you would not expect to absorb all of that.
So the Massive Open Online Course has a different attitude with respect to content. You’re not expected to absorb and ingest the content. You’re not expected to remember stuff and repeat it back. The content is the medium that we use in order to do the actual learning but it is not the stuff that we learn. I’ll talk more about that as we go on.
there is this aspect of the Massive Open Online Course that involves not just you and the material but you working with other people. And that’s crucial to the definition of the Massive Open Online Course.
What is success in a MOOC? Dave defines five steps:
- orient (figure out where stuff is),
- declare (and what that means is, setting up a place for yourself, setting up an identity for yourself, even, a little but, using course tags to identify that part of your material that you’re contributing as part of the course),
- and then network (because once you set up your space and write some posts nothing happens; it’s when you begin to connect with other people),
- and as you network you begin to find people you have affinity with (not necessarily people who are the same as you, but people who you can talk to, people who have an interest in a subject that corresponds with your interests),
- and then finally and most interestingly, find a purpose for the work that you are doing (why are you in this educational experience, where are you going to apply it).
And I was looking at that, and it says ’success in a MOOC’, and it seemed to me that it’s success in life as well. You know, a MOOC is like the web, and the web is like society, and society is like life, and it’s not about remembering stuff.
“This isn’t about how you can go out and be better teachers. It’s about how you can learn.” And you begin learning this way yourself, you begin learning by connecting yourself, and eventually later on it becomes relevant to your classroom. And it doesn’t become relevant in a way that I can say and you can remember, it becomes relevant in a way that you can understand you can apply because it’s your experience and your context.
Knowledge isn’t something that is given. It isn’t something that is acquired. It isn’t something that is poured into you like you were an empty vessel or written onto a blank slate like you were a blackboard. It is - you. It is your self. It is what you become. It is how your brain shapes itself as a result of the experiences that you have.
I think that in the MOOCs that we’ve done, to some degree, and in the MOOCs that others have done, to a much larger degree, too much of the interactivity has been focused around the facilitators. In the Stanford AI MOOC, it’s all about the facilitators, who are famous names in Artificial Intelligence. That’s not networking. And in our MOOCs as well people line up to - well they don’t really line up - they gather in small clusters to listen to George and Dave and myself and it’s hard to get them to gather in small clusters to communicate among themselves. So it all becomes centrally focused, and if you can’t find that centre you become lost.
We would like to see this model apply not just to 2000 but to 10,000 or 100,000 people, but if people go into it with the expectation that they have to develop a personal relationship with 100,000 people it’s not going to work.
MOOCs are open. What does ‘open’ mean? Open means that everybody can participate. But not simply that. There are many ways to participate. And I identify a couple here, because I think these are important. Open means, not simply ‘doing’, but being able to watch while other people do. Open means being able to participate, not just at the expert level, but at your own level.
Open means participating or doing things publicly so other people can watch. You hear a lot of talk about education creating this “safe” place. What that really means is education creating a place where you can do things where nobody else is watching. But if nobody else is watching nobody else is learning, and nobody else can learn. Openness means doing things openly, publicly, sharing them, watching them, and being able to be watched. It’s a hard concept. It takes a little courage.
