Stories

Tag: MOOC

  • The Law of Halves

    The Law of Halves

    How many people do you need to recruit ten thousand learners?

    The preliminary questions are: is there an established network of learners? This requires that learners are connected to each other, and not simply end nodes in a pyramidal structure.

    And, do you have access to the network?

    These questions may be answered empirically.

    Publish your course.

    Build it and they may come – through the network.

    This is the value proposition of the MOOC aggregators: sign up for one course and you become part of its network.

    Expect to receive frequent communication as the aggregator’s value to the institutions who feed it content depends on its ability to convert one course enrollment into a lifelong pattern of registrations.

    What if they do not come?

    Much seems to depend on the level of computer literacy.

    If your target learners are computer software engineers, offer a relevant, quality course and they are likely to find it.

    What if they are not?

    Traditional marketing principles apply.

    Send a targetted e-mail through a trusted channel to 500 addresses.

    Expect 25 to click through to your registration page.

    Then the Law of Halves applies.

    You will lose half through each successive step required to participate in the course.

    So let’s say 13 register.

    Half of those will actually start the course.

    So, if you want ten thousand learners, target 800,000 addresses.

    On the first step (targetted e-mail), you can improve the click-through rate by improving the clarity of the value proposition (read: selfish, what’s-in-it-for-me incentive) and by offering direct access (in the invitation e-mail) to a screencast that walks you through the enrollment process.

    On the successive steps, a combination of screencasts and live online sessions (call them “briefings” or “orientation” or whatever) can help.

    Last but not least, turning the launch of the course into an event requires synchronicity.

    Do not underestimate how much identity matters to the way human beings connect and interact online.

    Unless your learners are savvy enough to communicate through social media, e-mail remains the lowest common denominator.

    It is a necessary evil.

    The only way to push content, reminders, questions, or surveys to your learners.

    Unfortunately, a merciless law of diminishing returns applies there also.

    Your course’s mailings are likely to increasingly end up in spam or junk mail boxes.

    And e-mail fatigue ensures that even the most motivated learners will read fewer and fewer course-related communication that is dropped into their inboxes.

    Computer literacy is crucial, again, because low computer literacy makes it probable that a learner won’t be checking for false positives and is less likely to have developed the filtering skills to quickly process and correctly identify relevant e-mails.

    Photo: My first computer, a TRS-80 Pocket Computer.

  • Badges for online learning: gimmick or game-changer?

    Badges for online learning: gimmick or game-changer?

    As I’ve been thinking about building a MOOC for the 13.1 million Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers, I’ve become increasingly interested in connectivism. One of the platforms I’ve discovered is called P2PU (“Peer To Peer University”), which draws heavily on connectivist ideas.

    Surprise: on P2PU there is a debate raging on about badges, of all things. I initially scoffed. I’ve seen badges on Khan Academy and have read that they are very popular with learners, but did not really seriously consider these badges to be anything more than gimmicks.

    It turns out that badges are serious learning tools, and that makes sense from a connectivist perspective. A white paper from the Mozilla Foundation summarizes why and how, drawing on an earlier paper from P2PU’s co-founder Philipp Schmidt.

    George Siemens’s (2005) connectivism theory of learning is said to go “beyond traditional theories of learning (such as behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism) to include technology as a core element”. So badges in this theory would use technology itself ot make connections between learners.

    First, it is claimed that badges can capture and translate learning across contexts, with more granularity (detail) than degrees or cumulative grades, with a badge for each specific skill or quality — and showing off progression over time as badges accumulate (like medals pinned to a soldier’s chest or a general’s stripes). Therefore badges could signal achievement and be matched to specific job requirements.

    Second, badges are meant to encourage and motivate “participation and learning outcomes”. They are feedback mechanism — both gateway and signpost — on a learning path, ie showing what can be learned and when, as in Khan Academy’s Google-style map going from basic addition to multivariate calculus. In addition, they can also cover or highlight informal or soft skills of the kind that formal education doesn’t account for. And, in fact, making new badges available can be done in real time, fast enough to keep up with the pace of the fastest-changing fields (like IT or web development).

    Third, badges are thought to formalize and enhance social connections, as they can be considered a mechanism to promote identity and reputation within a learning community. By doing so, badges may in fact foster community, bringing together peers to formalize teams or communities of practice.

    There’s quite a bit of enthusiasm online for badges as successors to pre-digital forms of accreditation and authority, like university diplomas and CVs. For example, Jacy Hood, director of College Open Textbooks, declared in a blog comment:  ”We are optimistic that Mozilla Badges will become the new international educational currency/credentials and that traditional education institutions will recognize, accept, and award these badges.”

    Edutech blogger Mitchel Resnick explains that he is an increasingly lone voice to express skepticism about badges:

    I worry that students will focus on accumulating badges rather than making connections with the ideas and material associated with the badges – the same way that students too often focus on grades in a class rather than the material in the class, or the points in an educational game rather than the ideas in the game. Simply engaging students is not enough. They need to be engaged for the right reasons.

    For Resnick, it is the perception of a badge as a reward that throws back to behaviorist thinking:

    When we develop educational technologies and activities in my research group, we explicitly try to avoid anything that might be perceived as a reward – what Alfie Kohn characterizes as “Do this and you’ll get that.” Instead, we are constantly looking for ways to help young people build on their own interests, and providing them with opportunities to take on new roles.

    However, it really depents on the “Do this” component: what is the learner being asked to do? If it can be performed without engagement, then Resnick may be right. This implies that the reward component may not be the sole function of the badge itself but will depend on the activities required to obtain it.

    I started writing this as a badge skeptic. Yet, I’m already starting to think of additional benefits: in a visual online world, badges are visual indicators, rather than text on a screen. They can therefore mobilize visual symbols to trigger our cultural and emotional sensibilities, without requiring reading effort on our part. By looking a badge, we can recognize its shape, colors and design and identify its meaning. This is pretty powerful stuff for learning.

    What do you think?

  • Thinking about the first Red Cross Red Crescent MOOC

    Thinking about the first Red Cross Red Crescent MOOC

    You have no doubt heard about the Red Cross or Red Crescent. Some of you may be first aiders or otherwise already involved as volunteers in your community. My organization, the IFRC, federates the American Red Cross and the 186 other National Societies worldwide. These Societies share the same fundamental principles and work together to build resilient communities by reducing risks associated with disasters and, most important, by leveraging a community’s strengths into a long-term, sustainable future. The only distinguishing feature from one country to the next is the emblem in an otherwise secular movement: Muslim countries use a red crescent and Israel’s Magen David Adom uses the red “crystal” (offically recognized as an emblem) inside the star of David.

    Learning is a fundamental driver for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. People become volunteers, very often in their youth, to develop life-saving skills through extremely social forms of learning. The connection between youth, volunteers and learning are the very core of what we do to “save lives and change minds”. There are 13.1 million volunteers in the Red Cross and Red Crescent worldwide with a shared thirst for learning. This is a potentially massive, multilingual classroom — and the affordances of technology can help us realize the previously-unthinkable goal of linking these minds and hearts across borders for the purpose of learning together, from each other.

    So where do we start sharing and, yes, co-constructing knowledge? Historically, the IFRC’s approach could be described as “trickle-down”: the Federation worked with the leadership of its members to provide guidance and expertise. Eventually some of this reached the communities where most volunteers work, at the grassroots.

    In the last three years, something amazing has happened. IFRC invested in an online learning platform and made it open to all. Despite some limitations of this platform from a “new learning” standpoint, over 25,000 people have joined and they have already completed more than 30,000 online courses (which have been self-directed, individual click-through slides with a quiz at the end), with a completion rate close to 50%. 60% of these learners are volunteers from our National Societies — and most of them probably discovered the platform on their own, without being told to access it by their national leadership.

    So, where do we go now? I’m thinking about a MOOC.

    IFRC is organizing a global youth conference to bring together 150 youth activists from the Red Cross and other organizations, like YMCA, Boy Scouts, etc. Initially, the idea was to get them to write on our Learning network’s blog in answer to a set of questions about how youth are using technology to change the world. We did this with pretty amazing results in the run-up to RedTalk #12, an online webcast event. The mechanism was clunky: we used forum posts and pasted them into WordPress blog posts… We did not have recursive feedback, the multimodal meaning was limited to posting photos and videos as attachments to the forum posts, there was no formative assessment (only a post-event self-assessment), and the questions were the same for everyone. Despite these missing affordances, we collected an amazing 50 pages of writing from young people in 12 different countries and the live event brought together over 200 people in a powerful moment of communion and knowledge sharing.

    So, why a MOOC?

    IFRC’s youth policy declares that youth have “multiple roles” as “innovators, early adopters of communication, social media and other technologies, inter-cultural ambassadors, peer-to-peer facilitators, community mobilizes, agents of behavior change and advocates for vulnerable people.” That’s a tall order for young people.

    If I had to formulate learning objectives, they might look something like this:

    By participating in the MOOC, participants will develop their knowledge and skills to:

    •  discover and reflect how different technologies permeate our daily lives, by engaging with various online technologies used for social change and sharing experiences with others through a global online conversation in the run-up to the event.
    •  define technology and its place in humanitarian and development practice, by listening to and engaging with the RedTalk guest’s story during the one-hour live webcast.
    •  clarify what technology means in the context of a local/global humanitarian and development work.
    •  identify gaps in our understanding and use of technology, including the Digital Divide and inequalities in access related to gender, race or ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc.
    •  invent new ways of using technology to make our communities more resilient.

    To explore these, across the broad diversity of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, requires a flexible, localizable scaffolding. The aim is to start with the 150 conference participants but to open it up to anyone, anywhere. I can imagine weekly activities that people could do at their own pace, after adapting them to their local context. For example, I’d love to have K-12 teachers — wherever they may be — enrolling their students into the MOOC’s weekly activities, adding their voices to the mix. But I wonder if the objectives would be relevant — and, if they’re not, how to make them so?

    At this point, it’s just an idea in search of a platform and an audience beyond our own youth and volunteering networks.

    So what do you think?