Blog‎ > ‎

pMOOC pedagogical pattern

posted Nov 30, 2012, 2:21 AM by Yishay Mor   [ updated Nov 30, 2012, 2:25 AM ]
We are very busy developing our activities for the various weeks. If you want to have a peek, you can look at the OLDS MOOC OERs cloudscape. As the activities start to take form, a design pattern emerges:

pMOOC: project based-MOOC activity

Context

Massive open online course, following a collaborative project-based pedagogy. Over 1200 registered participants, although impossible to predict how many will actually show up. We expect a significant portion of participants to follow through the MOOC, dedicating 3-10 hours a week, while others will participate casually, dipping in and out and choosing the activities they want to complete.

Problem

How do you introduce new concepts, tools or practices, in a way that would be accessible and meaningful, assess learners understanding, and facilitate the emergence of social constructs, with very limited resources and large number of students?

Forces

  • A wide variety of topics to introduce and explore.
  • Aiming to introduce these topics in a manner that would engender both deep insights and practical use.
  • Learners distributed across the world.
  • Direct contact between facilitators and learners will be sporadic.
  • Some learners will follow a predefined path, others will chart their own path, and others will only visit selected activities.

Solution

Study - read a short text / view a video presenting the rationale and the core ideas.
Review - examine and critique a worked example.
Play - experiment with the tool / method.
Do - perform a structured task, using the tool / method, and produce outputs.
Share - publish these outputs to the web, and link to them from a shared space.
Assess - review your peer's productions.
Reflect - post an entry to your learning journal
Discuss - participate in an online discussion.

Variations

  • Research (in more depth) before or in parallel to the Do. 
  • Discuss before Reflect, or Reflect - Discuss - Reflect.
  • Demonstrate (after discuss): bring together whatever you think demonstrates what you got out of the activity, display it and apply for a badge.

Implementation

We implement each activity as a cloudscape, which includes the basic instructions and clouds for the resources for Study and Review. Participants produce a cloud which presents the products of Do. They Share that cloud in their portfolio, and add it to the activity cloudscape. The Assess by commenting on peer clouds. They Reflect by posting an entry to their learning journal. The activity is initiated through the announcement mailing list, and Discussed in local study circles and on the open list.


Comments