When My Sub-Editor is a Nit-Picking Bot: Mediating Roles of a TV News Scriptwriting Exercise

Online learning activities have promised new ways to engage students. This paper describes the design and use of the NewsScripts online learning exercise over a decade. This web-based television news scriptwriting exercise is used with media students at the University of Cape Town to expose them to news scriptwriting practices. Students write a script to match a video, employing a television news writing style. The more important transformational opportunity is deepening students’ own critical media analysis skills. Our focus is how the NewsScripts design evolved and changed over time to remain part of the curriculum. Underlying the curricula of university media programs are tensions around balancing analysis and critique with more practical skills. Even when such opportunities are created in the curriculum, it is challenging to entrench these as alternative forms of assessment to an essay. This paper describes successive cycles of the design of NewsScripts intersected with these curricula and planning concerns

Learning from the rhetoric of academics using educational technology

Seminar presentations, by academics successfully using educational technology to support their courses, form a visible part of many staff development programmes. These events contribute to developing a community of academics that use educational technology and are sharing experiences on its use in supporting teaching and learning. We draw on classic rhetorical analysis to highlight the epideictic or ceremonial form of these presentations we see as exemplary of these events. These presentations tend to be quite distinct from how educational technology research or best practice is disseminated. We argue that this epideictic form is a vital component in emerging communities of practice and, for example, communicates the value of working collaboratively. While the underlying intuition is widely acknowledged, our analysis offers a framework to view these conscious and stylistic choices across learning communities

Pedagogic strategies to support learning design thinking in a masters course

The demand for further skills and qualifications in the educational technology field remains strong as the range of technologies increases and their potential use in educational contexts becomes more compelling. Students registering for the University of Cape Town (UCT) Masters level courses are employed in schools, government agencies, universities, non-governmental organisations, or in the corporate sector, where their role in designing educational technology interventions represents part of their responsibilities. Because they have varying levels of experience in designing educational materials and/or using educational technologies, they need to develop learning design thinking and gain practice with a broad range of pedagogic strategies, theories, and technology tools to be productive in the workplace. Over the past four years we have developed and adopted a course for the needs of people who are keen to apply these skills in their work contexts. We describe here, the pedagogic strategies we explicitly adopted to model and support learning design thinking in one of four modules, Online Learning Design. The module adopts a learning design framework developed by Dabbagh and Bannan- Ritland (2005) to introduce students to design processes, and uses the same framework as a loose structure for the module and assignments. We apply Dabbagh and Bannan- Ritland's classification of pedagogic strategies to model and analyse approaches to cultivating learning design thinking amongst the students. As an analytic advice, we draw on Engeström's (2001) Activity Theory to describe the evolving learning context and our changing pedagogic strategies over four years. We focus on key tensions that emerged from the adoption of a range of pedagogic strategies to cultivate the students' learning design thinking when developing learning activities to communicate complex design issues. The key social change highlighted in this paper is that educational technology educators aiming to cultivate students' learning design thinking, need to apply their design thinking to their own practice

MOOC-making and Open Educational Practices

MOOCs have been seen as holding promise for advancing Open Education. While the pedagogical design of the first MOOCs grew out of the Open Education Movement, the current trend has MOOCs exhibiting fewer of the original openness goals than anticipated. The aim of this study is to examine the practices and attitudes of MOOC educators at an African university and ask whether and how their practices and attitudes become open after creating and teaching a MOOC. Activity Theory is used to contextually locate the educators’ motivations and to analyse their practices in terms of striving towards an object. With this lens we describe how educators’ openness-related practices and attitudes change over time in two different MOOCs. Two sets of conceptions of open practices are used to detect instances of change, providing four dimensions of changed open educational practices. Semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and artefacts provide data for this rare study, which considers these issues from the perspective of the Global South. Through studying the educators’ practices in relation to openness, it becomes evident how open practices are emergent and responsive

OER in and as MOOCs

This chapter reports on the investigation into the production and rollout of four Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, and on the experiences of the educators involved in their production. The overarching aim of this study is to address the question: How does MOOC-making with Open Educational Resources (OER) influence educators’ Open Educational Practices (OEP)? The authors were interested to know why UCT educators wanted to make MOOCs, whether they adopted OER, whether their practices become more open after making a MOOC, and in which ways. Drawing on Beetham et al. (2012) and Hodgkinson-Williams (2014), an analytic framework of OEP was developed comprising three dimensions: legal, pedagogical and financial. The research methodology is qualitative, using semi-structured interviews and data from MOOC discussion forums. Six MOOC lead educators were interviewed at three intervals: before their MOOCs ran, immediately after their MOOC’s first run, and six to 10 months later. Transcripts were coded using OEP concepts. The findings offer insights into the relationships between educators’ motivations for making MOOCs, their MOOC design tools, the OEP that can be identified and the contradictions they experienced in making MOOCs. Despite the challenges that educators faced, they largely achieved their purposes of making MOOCs and manifested legal, pedagogical and financial dimensions of OEP. The impact on educators’ open practices was observed in several subsequent projects after the MOOCs were first run. Tensions involved in making MOOCs, adopting OER and enacting OEP point to how educators could be better supported to become more open in their educational practices. No negative experiences were attributed to the creation of OER and, indeed, MOOC-making with OER appeared to be conducive to OER adoption in general. However, more time would be needed to conclude whether these educators could become OER advocates or could function autonomously in creating and sharing OER

Learning through engagement: MOOCs as an emergent form of provision

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a new form of educational provision occupying a space between formal online courses and informal learning. Adopting measures used with formal online courses to assess the outcomes of MOOCs is often not informative because the context is very different. The particular affordances of MOOCs shaping learning environments comprise scale (in terms of numbers of students) and diversity (in terms of the types of students). As learning designers, we focus on understanding the particular tools and pedagogical affordances of the MOOC platform to support learner engagement. Drawing on research into learner engagement conducted in the broader field of online learning, we consider how learner engagement in a MOOC might be designed for by looking at three pedagogical aspects: teacher presence, social learning, and peer learning

Developing world MOOCs: A curriculum view of the MOOC landscape

MOOCs offer opportunities but are also pose the danger of further exacerbating existing educational divisions and deepening the homogeneity of global knowledge systems. Like many universities globally, South African university leaders and those responsible for course, curriculum, and learning technology development are coming to grips with the implications and possibilities of online and open education for their own institutions. What opportunities do they offer to universities, especially from the point of view of research-focused campus-based institutions which have not yet engaged with MOOCs and have little history with online courses? Given the complexities of the MOOC-scape, this paper provides a means for contextualising the options within an institutional landscape of educational provision as possibilities for MOOC creation, use and adaptation. This takes into account what is currently available and identifies what new opportunities can be explored. Refining this further, a categorisation of existing MOOCs is provided that maps to broad institutional interests. The notion of courses offered by universities as being either primarily ‘inward’ or ‘outward’ facing is explained. Five categories of MOOCs are described: Category One, Teaching Showcase; Category Two, Gateway Skills; Category Three, Graduate Skills; Category Four, Professional Skills and Category Five, Research Showcase. These are elaborated on and examples provided. This taxonomy provides a nuanced way of understanding MOOCs and MOOC type courses in order for educators to strategically prioritise and decision makers to support the full gamut of emergent opportunities

MOOCs, openness and changing educator practices: an Activity Theory case study

The practices and perceptions of educators formed through the creation and running of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provide a case study of how educators understandings of ‘openness’ change (Beetham et al 2012, p 3). We are interested in how educators engage with open education resources (OER) and openness as part of developing open online courses, and how this informs their practices and attitudes afterwards. Deepening understandings of these changes is important for informing strategies involving helping educators in adopting productive open educational practices. Our research question is how do educators’ practices change or not change when using - or not using - OER in and as a MOOC? We are interested in whether and why educators adopt open practices in their MOOCs. We employ an Activity Theory (AT) conceptual framework as a heuristic tool to track and thickly describe educators’ practices and perceptions. This frame enables us to locate educators’ practices - in a context of mediating nodes, i.e., tools/artefacts, rules, divisions of labour, and community – as they strive towards and consider their object. The object upon which the educators act is the development of a new interdisciplinary field. We focus on the role of two mediating artefacts introduced into the activity system, namely Creative Commons (CC) licenses and the ‘MOOC design’. We describe how the open aspect of these artefacts mediate and affect educator’s perceptions, attitudes and educational practices in the context of their object-directed activity system. We draw predominantly on semi-structured interviews with the MOOC lead educators and the MOOC learning designers. Interviews were conducted at two time intervals, before and after the MOOC has run. From this we craft two activity systems. We have categorised our findings according to Beetham et al’s dimensions of open practices. Further, two broad themes emerged from the data analysis. These are Affordances of the MOOC and Reflection on educational practice

Mangrove or mudflat: Prioritising fish habitat for conservation in a turbid tropical estuary

Mangrove habitats are typically the focus of conservation efforts in tropical estuaries because their structural complexity is thought to support greater biodiversity and nursery function than unvegetated habitats. However, evidence for this paradigm has been equivocal in turbid tropical estuaries where unvegetated mudflats are also highly productive. The present study compared the community composition, biodiversity, nursery-role and commercial fish biomass in two mangrove habitats and one mudflat habitat in the Gulf of Paria, Trinidad. A total of 12 705 fishes, comprising 63 species from 26 families, were sampled in mangrove creeks, seaward mangrove fringe and the subtidal margin of an intertidal mudflat from June 2014 to June 2015. The composition of the creek and mudflat communities were distinct, while the community of the mangrove fringe more closely resembled the mudflat than the mangrove creeks. Mean species richness (MSR), total species richness (TSR) extrapolated from species accumulation curves, and juvenile species richness (JSR) were significantly greater in the mudflat (MSR = 11.4 ± 1.0; TSR = 75 ± 14; JSR = 9.1 ± 0.8) than mangrove creeks (MSR = 9.0 ± 0.5; TSR = 49 ± 3; JSR = 6.1 ± 0.4) and the seaward mangrove fringe (MSR = 6.4 ± 0.7; TSR = 58 ± 14; JSR = 5.2 ± 0.4). Meanwhile, Shannon Weiner diversity, juvenile fish abundance and commercial fish biomass were comparable between habitats. These findings caution against the generalisation that mangroves are the most important habitat for fishes in turbid tropical estuaries. There is now a growing body of evidence that mudflats warrant consideration as important repositories of biodiversity and nursery function for juvenile fishes