[Stuart Allan]

Hi Megan, for some reason I can’t hit ‘reply’ to your message so I’ll reply to myself instead!

We offer asynchronous question-and-answer forums between students and faculty, and the students also facilitate their own peer-to-peer forum outside our VLE.

One of the things I’m interested in is bringing this P2P interaction into our mainstream offering, as obviously with such a high number of students it’s difficult to increase the level of faculty interaction we can provide. However, we have the usual concerns (e.g. who moderates it and what if someone says something inappropriate/misleading; will students interact in the same way if they think we’re watching them, etc).

I’m also interested in the idea of students collaborating via their own spaces (e.g. personal blogs, Twitter) and then we thread these together in a daily digest, a la ocTEL. Has anyone else tried this on their own programme?

[Stuart Allan]

Thanks James and Megan. I work on an MBA programme with 11,000 students, roughly a third of whom study completely via distance learning. So it is possible to break the 1:20 ratio outside a MOOC. (I’d call our programme a MOC – i.e. without the ‘open’!)

That’s not to say we shouldn’t be doing more to help distance learners feel part of a community and support them in their studies. In fact, that’s one of the main things I’m trying to get out of ocTEL.

[Stuart Allan]

“Think as a global participant … the knowledge you need to learn a complex subject is not going to be contained in one individual or institution. It’s going to be distributed.”

This kind of sums up my main reservation about MOOCs at the moment. In the interview George Siemens seems to view learning as an endlessly social experience, where no one individual has all of the answers and learning content is merely ‘a conduit for connections’.

If that’s the case, why would students bother with educators? Couldn’t they just look at a list of aggregated bookmarks or search for themselves? Isn’t it the job of educational institutions to curate and present information that’s reliable and authoritative, rather than just being a conduit to infinite connections? (As one contributor to the week 0 webinar commented, ‘Are MOOCs just bad elearning?’)

And what about assessment? In my own experience (in HE), students aren’t just learning for learning’s sake; they’re learning so that they come out with a level of proficiency that they can demonstrate to their boss. (Inevitably, that means passing an exam or submitting an assessment.) As mid-career professionals, they certainly don’t have the time to network endlessly or chase down information that might not be on the exam.

I must look into a different TEL approach next week – this is turning into a MOOC about MOOCs!

[Stuart Allan]

Thanks @LauraMcLoughlin, that’s really interesting to hear. I agree that machine assessment sounds risky. On our course website students can sit multiple-choice questions and get automated answer feedback; they can also sit essay or case study questions, then compare their answer plan to the examiner’s perfect answer and self-rate against it. (I wonder how honest they are in their self-assessment though!)

I should have said that a lot of our students take up the option of studying via an accredited local centre, so clearly the need for support is there. I’m wondering if there’s anything out there that can help our students who learn via ‘pure’ distance learning though (i.e. without the support of a local centre).

Hopefully the course and this small group will give me some ideas! Thanks again for posting.

[Stuart Allan]

Apologies if this has been covered already, but I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on the week 0 webinar.

I work on a distance-learning programme in higher education that has 11,000 active students, with a relatively small faculty and support team, so I was interested to hear Diana’s comment that ‘it’s not higher education if you’re not providing support … nurturing and advising’. Is this really the case?

She also talked about using peer assessment or machine grading to increase the scalability of online courses.  Does anyone have experience of this?

Instinctively I’d say that peer learning definitely has a place, but that this is more appropriate to supporting / nurturing than to assessment. What do you think?

[Stuart Allan]

Hi everyone, I’d like to join this group too.

I work on producing distance learning courses for business education. (Although I should say that my background is in publishing, rather than academia.) Most of our course materials are text-based (printed text, e-book and online cases/MCQs); we’re looking to increase students’ sense of engagement and help them with conceptual bottlenecks by developing additional e-learning resources.

It’s been interesting putting myself in the position of a student again, and particularly to experience how overwhelming it can be to assimilate lots of textual information from lots of different sources. As Kari says, the smaller communities of practice could be a really useful peer-to-peer forum though.

Looking forward to getting to know you all over the next few weeks.

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