MOOCs, Citizen Science and Cultural Communication

#WUNGDC15

@GraemeEarl

MOOCs?

• Massive Open Online Courses

What are MOOCs made from?

• xMOOCs vs cMOOCs: implications for cultural diversity?

– Some calls for a new kind of MOOC specifically targeting culturally-specific topics

• Videos

• Learning objects

• Quizes

• Linked resources (including learner contributions)

• Feedback

– Comments/ forums

– e.g. Google hangouts

How are MOOCs run?

• Educators

• Facilitators

• Returning learners (“mentors”)

• Learners (online/ face to face/ blended)

• External learners (i.e. not registered on the course – again, may be f2f)

How are “MOOCs” funded?

• Institutions (recruitment; profile; philanthropy)

• Certificates (evidence now of reaching self-sustaining tipping point)

• Examinations and other feedback e.g. professional accreditation (CPD)

• Data mining

• Advertising

• Privacy and tailoring (similar to the freemium model)

MOOCs are *the end of everything*

• “Unbundling the university” ? Avalanche Is Coming? (See

Ben Wildavsky’s talk)

• Open Badges and “jailbreaking the degree” - Degreed

• Mitchell Duneier – TA slaves?

• Dumbing down? Try the cryptography MOOC…

• Drop out rates? See Hugh Davis talks

• Everything has to be open?

Diversity in MOOC themes?• Bias in MOOC demographics? E.g. Developed world,

education level bias (Christensen et al 2013; see FL demographics)

– World Bank and Coursera – running courses, Open Learning Campus, African Virtual University

• “Decolonising the web” (WUN IIRN Sydney 2015) ?

– Indigenous Studies: Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Course Central)

– Reconciliation Through Indigenous Education (edX)

– Aboriginal Worldviews and Education (Coursera)

– But what kinds of knowledge and modes of knowledge creation and communication?

– The cultural implications of English and the need for negotiating English use “locally” ?

• Are OERs already well in advance in terms of cultural diversity?

MOOC as Cultural Containers?

• Web Science & MOOCs MOOC Observatory

• Discussions of power by Professor Sassen

– Particularly, the work/ life digital confluence and economic status

• Familiarity with networked interactions (rich/poor) – are MOOC “learning communities” biased towards the affluent?

– Navigational metaphors?

Navigation

• Guo and Reinecke 2014 – studied more than 100,000 students

on 4 courses

• Learning style influences navigation e.g. jumping back to earlier

details, scanning vs linear navigation, and so on

– Only one fifth of (certified) learners studied adopted a linear

pathway

• Demographics e.g. age or country, used in turn to suggest

correlations with subsidiary variables e.g. student/ teacher ratio

in that country

– For example, linear navigation much more common in

demographics where teacher: student ratio is lower

Guo and Reinecke 2014

Cultural contextualisation?

• Growing research comparing cultural discriminants with MOOC design

• Risk of neo-colonialism (Nkuyubwatsi 2014)

• Ethics? e.g. Alvarez 2014 – requirement to consider and accommodate any diversity in educational practice but cf.

– MOOC role in marketing;

– the digital divide;

– “blindness to difference” (Harri 2009)

• (Over) emphasis on technological solutions (i.e. contra to critiques of navigation) e.g. platforms and a lack of emphasis on their inherent cultural bias e.g. threaded forums

Cultural contextualisation?

• Cultural diversity in language and access

• Range of suggestions e.g. privacy policies, limiting idiom, avoiding cultural stereotyping (Marrone et al 2013)

• And…

– Much of the conversation is mediated through other channels, sometimes for privacy reasons e.g. UoS Web Science MOOC

– Ethics of social media alignment, anonymity, and ‘consent’ ?

Cultural contextualisation?

• How contextualize?

– Social media & F2F groups

– Specialisation e.g. choice of topic for a particular exercise

– Explicit inclusion in course design e.g. choice of exercise to complete

– Educator flexibility to this contextualization process, even contra their favoured teaching style

• Technological affordances of MOOCs should emerge through Value-Sensitive Design

Citizen Translation

• Open Translation MOOC http://www.ot12.org/

• edX CAT course https://www.edx.org/course/principles-practice-computer-aided-pekingx-01718330x

• traMOOC http://www.ouslovenia.net/project/tramooc/(topic analysis and sentiment analysis for evaluation)

• Crowd translation e.g. Duolingo or form within MOOCs

• Educator-led manual translation

The value of cultural diversity?

• Kulkarni et al 2015: Deliberate creation

of globally diverse virtual classrooms.

• Small groups that are ephemeral and

encourage “self-reference” i.e.

contextualization. (Tendency for

exaggerated behavior and taking on

novel learning personae (by some) may

not always be a negative; see also e.g.

Turkle)

• Pupil/ teacher ratio here used as a

factor to encourage diversity, alongside

other factors

• Positive impact on learning seen

“In your country, which forms of

prejudice are the most socially

acceptable, and which ones are

the least acceptable? Why are

some forms more acceptable

than others?” (Social Psychology

course discussion topic)

“Archaeology of Portus”

Archaeology of Portus: exploring the lost harbour of ancient Rome• Archaeological practice

• Portus in the Roman world

• Scales of archaeological analysis

• Types of archaeological materials

• Encouraged contributions by the MOOC community to build up a picture of Portus using the same structure.

• Each week we relate an artefact to the history of the site for that week and to the scale for that week.

• Each video is less than 5m in length

• FutureLearn model based on social learning around “steps”

Developed by Grant Cox @gbjc105

Developed by Peter Wheeler @Peter__Wheeler and @James_E_Miles

Developed by Peter Wheeler @Peter__Wheeler, Hembo

Pagi @HemboPagi and Ian Kirkpatrick @iankirkpatrick

• Rich Interactive Narratives

• ChronoZoom

• Photosynth

Interactions

Content by Peter Wheeler @Peter__Wheeler, Greg Tucker

Interactions

Works by @iandawson and @gcbeale

• Translation (manual)

• Flickr providing cross-references and folksonomies

• Social e.g. aggregated blogs to MOOC blog, Vimeo, Sphere, Scoop.it, Mendeley etc.

• Social elements are not new but now *so easy*

Widening the community

CIP, UG, PGT and PGR students filmed & facilitating

Course being used at UG and PGT level in 2014/15

F2F students keen on community membership

Bridging F2F and MOOC communities

Portus: enriching F2F for our students

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

• Personalisation (e.g.

“Graeme”) encourages related

behavior by learners

– Some evidence for impact

on v high retention rate

• Attempt at a standard English

may be misguided – better to

focus on realities of

individual’s communication ?

– cf. our legibility analysis

(GFOG etc.)

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

• Commonly now our UoS courses begin with an introduce yourself step – an icebreaker

• Behaviour here fits with that seen in the literature e.g.

– use of profile to define general context “single parent; Retired engineer; learning disabilities”

– detailed context in comments “Didn’t understand the previous point because I…”

– frequently with caveats: “Although I haven’t…”

• Fluid roles of facilitators – not always defined in their profile or name e.g. Graeme Earl vs Graeme Earl (Educator)

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

• Creating an archaeological “MOOCosystem” including many OERs might assist cultural diversity BUT has demographic bias

• Create deep links and analyse routes e.g.

– “The Later Second Century”

– “The life of Hadrian” (Hadrian’s Wall -FutureLearn)

– “Constructing the wall” (Roman Architecture – Coursera)

• Mash-up courses e.g. Creative Writing (“Imagine Portus”) or Creative Coding (“Modelling Portus”)

• Note: I made deep links to the platform across all media and didn’t receive a single complaint

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

• Fairly flat demographic (age, education, employment)

• Countries: c. 50% UK; 20% US; Australia 5%; 3% Italy + c. 110 others

• Growing Italian engagement in the course (Portus and local identity)

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

• “MOOC Observatory”: Learning analytics and cultural diversity.

• 98 UoS MOOC datasets so far; > 500,000 comments; demographic and learner data for >100,000 learners.

• Improved learning design through analytics, and learner interaction (e.g. topic mining).

• Strict ethical framework.

• Demographic analyses underway.

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

30

E.g. massive viewing figures for soton eprints

PDFs linked from the course, with the FL

platform providing an impromptu peer review

system.

E.g. follow-up post giving results to

Palaeoenvironmental advanced step

E.g. a few staff and students contributed blog

posts linking Portus to their research

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

• Access to data and tools powerful component; encouraged co-creation of digital cultural artefacts

• Data MOOCs? Citizen research and cultural practice?

– E.g. Zooniverse – the Galaxy Zoo journal

– E.g. potential for groups such as Indigo Trust – Open Data; technology for social change

• MOOCs bridging Press : Documentaries (second screening) : Education : Publication : Data

Lessons from Archaeology of Portus

• Potential for rich video annotation:

• Via Synote some videos are being richly annotated by learners

• All Portus videos will be openly accessible without FutureLearnlogin before the summer; allowing

– Mashups

– New linking and referencing

– Rich annotation of all videos

– Personal transcripts

• Please contact me to signup

A MOOC for WUN?

Many thanks.@GraemeEarl

@UoSFLPortus

Sign up! https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/portus