PhD Student Seminar: How to design and orchestrate a MOOC as a collaborative knowledge community

Presenter: Stian Håklev, PhD candidate, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Abstract:

There is a long history of pedagogical research on collaborative learning. From a cognitive perspective, when students learn together, they are forced to externalize their ideas, work with multiple shared representations of knowledge structures, and collaborate to converge on a shared understanding of meaning. From a socio-constructivist perspective, bringing in and valuing the perspectives and experiences of different students makes the learning experience richer and more valuable to all.

Massive Open Online Courses, with thousands of students from all around the world, would seem to offer rich opportunities to support collaboration, and to build on the diversity of the participants’ experiences and ideas. Yet so far, most MOOCs have been limited to short videos, quizzes, and open discussion forums which quickly become overwhelming.

This talk will present the design and outcome of the course “INQ101x: Teaching With Technology and Inquiry: An Open Course For Teachers”, a course designed in collaboration between OISE researchers (Dr. Slotta’s lab) and the University of Toronto Schools, which ran on EdX in the summer of 2015. Targeted towards in-service teachers, the course was designed around the idea of a knowledge community, with a number of “pedagogical scripts” supporting “crowd-sourcing” (taking advantage of the masses) as well as small-group collaboration. I will share the design principles that we extracted, and also discuss the technological challenges with implementing complex pedagogical scripts within a mainstream MOOC platform.

Bio:

Stian Håklev is a PhD candidate in Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at OISE, and the KMDI program. He will defend his dissertation “From seminar to lecture to MOOC: Scripting and orchestration at scale” on July 19th. He was a co-founder of the Peer2Peer University, an innovative pre-cursor to current-day MOOCs, and is currently working with the Office of Online Learning Strategy as the data coordinator for UofT’s Coursera and EdX MOOCs. He is also passionate about Science 2.0 and open scholarship.