Crowdsourcing MOOC Interactions: Using a Social Media Site cMOOC to Engage Students in University Course Activities

This paper reports on a study of the utilization of a connectivist-style Massive Open Course, or cMOOC, to engage students in online activities that were part of a first-year School of Education course. A customized ELGG social software platform, implemented as the Curtin Learning Commons, was developed to deliver a six-week cMOOC. The cMOOC, titled Participating in the Digital Age (PDA), engaged students in activities that used a variety of social media and crowdsourcing techniques to provide educational content and experiences. The goals of this MOOC were to provide conceptual understandings and opportunities to participate in tasks exemplifying the topic. The study presents evidence that blending MOOCs with classroom-based or online learning does provide higher education learners with personalized active learning opportunities. Further research on providing scaffolded support to enable learners to capitalize on additional aspects of networked learning in cMOOCs would advance this use. Introduction Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia provides programs for over 60,000 students both in Australia and abroad. The university delivers Australia’s only fully online K-12 undergraduate Bachelor of Education degree, has a large internationally recognized business program, and works to innovate in blended and online course deliveries. Programs include undergraduate and graduate degrees studying in a wide variety of large enrollment, campus-based, and online-based delivery modes. Many of the common core courses offered by the Curtin Business School, for example, have several hundred students enrolled at any one time. These present challenges in delivery from the point of the lecturer and student. Consistent assessment, information flow from the lead course lecturer, support for students when and where they require it are some examples of these challenges. The School of Education too has large enrolment courses in the first year Education program, delivered in campus or fully online modes. Curtin University’s Center for Teaching and Learning identified connecting students to their peers, to support educational activities outside of class as an innovation that could further assist students to achieve academic success, regardless of what delivery mode they take. This innovation and experimental attitude was the initiation point for a cMOOC development project in 2014. The goal, and underlying design of Curtin’s School of Education MOOC, was to utilize a connectiviststyle (cMOOC) experience to provide student-centric learning designed to engage students in online activities that supported learning on the topic of the digital age participation. Wikipedia describes a MOOC as an “online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions between students, professors, and teaching assistants (TAs).” (Wikipedia, 2015) Furthermore Dave Cormier, the researcher who coined the term MOOC, provides a definition of cMOOCs which highlights the pedagogy, tools, and goals guiding the PDA MOOC design. Cormier describes cMOOCs as those which have “four types of activities: aggregate, remix, repurpose and feed forward. Therefore the intention of cMOOCs is to harness the power of social and participatory media to enable participants to communicate and collaborate through a variety of channels; for example Twitter, blogs, wikis, etc. and the use of hashtags and curation tools (such as Pinterest or Scoop.it) to filter and aggregate. The focus is on personalisation, but also collective intelligence (Lévy 1997). Each participate forges their own learning path through the materials; picking and mixing which content, activities and communications are meaningful for them.” (Conole, 2014, p.70) The potential for personalization, crowd sourced interaction and support, and open-endedness of the exploration provides a much-needed exploration of how cMOOCs might be able to support for-credit university courses. The PDA MOOC was the first of the Curtin MOOCs designed to support the activities of an existing, indelivery course while at the same time providing open learning opportunities for Curtin students and other interested online learners. Curtin’s first year Education course titled, “Living and Learning in the Digital Age” (LLDA), a 13-week course delivered in both campus and fully online modes, utilized the PDA MOOC in a parallel delivery. The goals of the MOOC were to provide conceptual understandings and opportunities to participate in tasks exemplifying the topic. This provided an experiential learning space about the very topics being presented in both the PDA MOOC and LLDA courses. The parallel delivery with LLDA provided students with an innovation that supported active learning as a further way to engage in the topics that were relevant to the LLDA credit course. Another aspect of the MOOC is that it continues to persist as a drop-in MOOC for new learners with further plans for other cMOOCs on the website planned in 2017 (www.curtincommons.com). The outcome of the delivery and tools used by students in terms of value for learning is presented in the following sections. Pedagogy and Factors Relating to cMOOC Implementation Distance education, as a field of education, has the unique challenge of transactional distance (Moore, 1997) between the teacher and the learner that must be addressed in every course design. In face-to-face (F2F) classrooms, teachers have the ability to view their students and use real-time physical communication skills, such as reading body language, to support and guide learners. In print-based distance education programs learner support was designed into the course materials as best as possible, however this approach leaves the student support mainly on the students’ own shoulders. Now with distance education’s ability to move into the eLearning space, delivering materials and experiences in online spaces, transactional distance has certainly been greatly reduced. Teacher-designed supports in many forms – social media, customvideo, email, Skype – are tools commonly employed to address transactional distance. However, these approaches neither scale to very large numbers of students, as many of the xMOOC research reports, nor take advantage of other support factors in a F2F classroom. One of these other factors is support by other learners in the classroom. In the PDA MOOC the instructor-designers selected cMOOC pedagogy while also designing for large numbers of students. The goal of supporting PDA MOOC learners by enabling them to access peer supports and personalize their learning pathways through internal (to the environment) exposure to social media tools and crowdsourced discussions were the key attributes of the Connectivist approach. According to Anderson and Dron (2012), three families of distance education pedagogies Cognitivist-behaviourist (CB), Constructivist, and Connectivist – may each have a role in the delivery of effective distance