One of the debates around MOOCs is whether learners find it a bit lonely and isolated, and hence cause the drop out rates we see in early iterations of this sort of learning design and delivery platform. Of course, it is quite ironic that learners should feel this way given the total participants for a MOOC could run into thousands but in a virtual environment which is mainly asynchronous in nature, it is not unlike the feeling a learner gets when he or she completes an e learn.
Being social in nature, we crave relationships in a learning context, but as MOOCs have a heavy dose of self study involved, the challenge seems to be how we engage learners with the content through social designs but at the same time encouraging the skills of independent learning, reflection and contemplation, and critical thinking around what one is learning and experiencing.
One interesting strand on improving the social glue is through self and peer assessment and evaluation. Although the idea is not new, the virtual world has opened up opportunities which may have been un achievable in the past, at least on a massive scale. And as the platforms underlying MOOCs are only really good at machine-graded assessments (eg multiple choice, quantitative based problems) there seems to be an opportunity in MOOCs to use participants to assess each other's qualitative work (textual based work).
There are many reasons why such self and peer assessments need to carefully planned and monitored; many social psychology theories around the preservation of self-concept (trying to be top of the class by being overly mean on the way one assesses another's work) can conspire against it's success. But there are real benefits eg freeing up the subject matter expert's time to focus on knowledge transfer and application of learning in real scenarios, as well as the learner gaining a better and deeper understanding of the material. And if you use it on formative (how can we improve) rather than purely summative assessments (what grade or mark shall I give) then there is scope for extending the value of collaborative learning.
Being social in nature, we crave relationships in a learning context, but as MOOCs have a heavy dose of self study involved, the challenge seems to be how we engage learners with the content through social designs but at the same time encouraging the skills of independent learning, reflection and contemplation, and critical thinking around what one is learning and experiencing.
One interesting strand on improving the social glue is through self and peer assessment and evaluation. Although the idea is not new, the virtual world has opened up opportunities which may have been un achievable in the past, at least on a massive scale. And as the platforms underlying MOOCs are only really good at machine-graded assessments (eg multiple choice, quantitative based problems) there seems to be an opportunity in MOOCs to use participants to assess each other's qualitative work (textual based work).
There are many reasons why such self and peer assessments need to carefully planned and monitored; many social psychology theories around the preservation of self-concept (trying to be top of the class by being overly mean on the way one assesses another's work) can conspire against it's success. But there are real benefits eg freeing up the subject matter expert's time to focus on knowledge transfer and application of learning in real scenarios, as well as the learner gaining a better and deeper understanding of the material. And if you use it on formative (how can we improve) rather than purely summative assessments (what grade or mark shall I give) then there is scope for extending the value of collaborative learning.
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