Formative and Summative Analyses of Disciplinary Engagement and Learning in Big Open Online Course

Situative theories of knowing and participatory approaches to learning and assessment were used to design and then analyze learning in a “big open online course” (“BOOC”) on educational assessment. The course was delivered using Google’s Course Builder platform which was customized extensively to support both summative and formative analyses of disciplinary social engagement and individual learning. The course featured personalized “wikifolio” public assignments peer commenting, endorsement, & promotion, formal online examinations, open digital badges, and participatory learning analytics. The course was first completed by 60 students in 2013 and impressive levels of engagement and learning were documented. The course was further refined in 2014 with embedded streaming videos, embedded formative assessments, and streamlined learning analytics. Of the sixty students who registered for the course, 22 completed it. This paper illustrates the more formative learning analytics used to advance the shared discourse in the course as well as the other new features and provides detailed evidence of engagement & learning.Googl

A principled approach to the design of collaborative MOOC curricula

MOOCs have the potential to benefit from the large number of very diverse learners that participate in courses, but this requires a principled approach to MOOC curriculum development. Courses need to take into consideration the diversity of learner experience and intentions, and incorporate scripts that both benefit from the large numbers of learners (crowd-sourcing), as well as enabling small-scale intense collaboration. The real challenge is tying together a set of learning activities and the development of a community knowledge base, with the specific curriculum learning goals of the course. This paper offers a pragmatic approach to developing courses, based on the experience of a MOOC for teacher professional development

An Online Engagement Framework for Higher Education

Student engagement is understood to be an important benchmark and indicator of the quality of the student experience for higher education; yet the term engagement continues to be elusive to define and it is interpreted in different ways in the literature. This paper firstly presents a short review of the literature regarding online engagement in the higher education environment, moving beyond discipline-specific engagement. It then presents a conceptual framework which builds upon recurring themes within the literature, including students’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours. The framework was developed by adopting a constant comparison method to analyse the literature, and to search for and identify current and emerging themes. The framework identifies indicators for five key elements of online engagement, and the authors propose that the framework provides a guide for researchers and academics when exploring online engagement from a conceptual, practical and research basis. Finally, the paper provides recommendations for practice, outlining how the framework might be used to reflect critically upon the effectiveness of online courses and their ability to engage students

Expansive Framing as Pragmatic Theory for Online and Hybrid Instructional Design

This article explores the complex question of how instruction should be framed (i.e., contextualized). Reports from the US National Research Council reveal a broad consensus among experts that most instruction should be framed with problems, examples, cases, and illustrations. Such framing is assumed to help learners connect new knowledge to broader “real world” knowledge, motivate continued engagement, and ensure that learners can transfer their new knowledge to subsequent contexts. However, different theories of learning lead to different assumptions about when such frames should be introduced and how such frames should be created. This article shows how contemporary situative theories of learning argue that frames should be (a) introduced before instructional content, (b) generated by learners themselves, (c) used to make connections with people, places, topics, and times beyond the boundaries of the course, and (d) used to position learners as authors who hold themselves and their peers accountable for their participation in disciplinary discourse. This expansive approach to framing promises to support engagement with disciplinary content that is productive (i.e., increasingly sophisticated, raising new questions, recognizing confusion, making new connections, etc.) and generative (i.e., supporting transferable learning that is likely to be useful and used in a wide range of subsequent educational, professional, achievement, and personal contexts). A framework called Participatory Learning and Assessment (PLA) is presented that embeds expansively framed engagement within multiple levels of increasing formal assessments. This paper first summarizes PLA as theory-laden design principles. It then presents PLA as fourteen more prescriptive steps that some may find easier to implement and to learn as they go. Examples are presented from several courses from an extended program of design-based research using this approach in online and hybrid secondary, undergraduate, graduate, and technical courses.Indiana University Office of the Vice Provost of Information Technolog

An Analysis of Factors that Impact Diffusion and Adoption of Digital Badges

Digital badges are electronic icons used to recognize learning or participation in activities. Open digital badges offer the additional affordance of embedded metadata that can link to the criteria for earning the badge, evidence of the skill, and other information including issuer details. Badge systems have prompted instructional designers to consider teaching and learning in new ways. Open digital badges offer an alternative and innovative approach to pedagogy and assessment (Grant, 2016). This qualitative multi-case study examined digital badge programs being used at three higher education institutions, at the course level, the department level, and the university level. The study sought to explore the adoption of badges in higher education using Rogers’ (2003) innovation diffusion theory to identify factors associated with the adoption process in order to provide contextual insight into factors that impede and facilitate successful implementation of badge systems. Rogers established that there are five specific characteristics of innovations (relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability) which are attributed to varying rates of adoption (2003). Rogers (2003) indicated that the innovation attributes of relative advantage, compatibility, observability, and trialability positively impacted innovation adoption. In the current study, through data collected from interviews, questionnaires, and extensive archival document analysis, the main factors found to facilitate diffusion and adoption of badges were compatibility of the badge program with the institution’s values and needs, observability of the value of badges both internally and externally, and relative advantage of badges grounded by a clear purpose that is communicated to stakeholders. Trialability was not shown to play a significant part in the successful adoption of the badge programs in this study. Rogers (2003) found that the innovation attribute, complexity, negatively impacted innovation adoption. The results of the current study also attributed factors related to complexity as barriers to successful adoption of badges in each of the three cases. Specifically, the current study found that usability issues, increased faculty workload, and a lack of understanding of the badges’ purpose and value were the main factors which negatively impacted badge adoption. The goal of this study was to provide insight on best practices to those interested in implementing badge programs in order to optimize success of badge program implementation

From Seminar to Lecture to MOOC: Scripting and Orchestration at Scale

This dissertation investigates the design of large online courses from the pedagogical perspective of knowledge communities. Much of the learning sciences literature has concerned itself with groups of up to 20-30 students, but in universities, courses of several hundred to more than a thousand students are common. At the same time, new models for life-long and informal learning, such as Massive Open Online Courses, are emerging. Amidst this growing enthusiasm for innovation around technology and design in teaching, there is a need for theoretically grounded innovations and rigorous research around practical models that support new approaches to learning. One recent model, known as Knowledge Community and Inquiry (KCI), engages students in the co-construction of a community knowledge base, with a commonly held understanding of the collective nature of their learning, and then provides a sequence of scaffolded inquiry activities where students make use of the knowledge base as a resource. Inspired by this approach to designing courses, the research began with a redesign of an in-service teacher education course, which increased in size from 25 to 75 students. This redesign was carefully analyzed, and design principles extracted. The second step was the design of a Massive Open Online Course for several thousand in-service teachers on technology and inquiry, in collaboration with an affiliated secondary school. A number of innovative design ideas were necessary to accommodate the large number of users, the much larger diversity in terms of background, interest, and engagement among MOOC learners, and the opportunities provided by the platform. The resulting design encompasses a 6- week long curriculum script, and a number of overlapping micro-scripts supported by a custom- written platform that integrated with the EdX platform in a seamless manner. This thesis presents the course structure, including connection to disciplinary principles, its affordances for community and collaboration and its support of individual differentiated learning and collective epistemology. It offers design principles for scripting and orchestrating collective inquiry designs for MOOCS and higher education courses