Half an Hour: MOOC - The Resurgence of Community in Online Learning - 0 views
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My understanding of the term ‘MOOC’ is a bit different; it is derived from a theory of learning based on engagement and interaction within a community of practitioners, without predetermined outcomes, and without a body of knowledge that we can simply ‘transfer’ to the learner.
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“to teach is to model and to demonstrate; to learn is to practice and reflect.”
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What we are attempting to repeat on a massive scale in a MOOC is not the delivery of instruction or the management of learning resources. We are trying to emulate, on a massive scale, these small-scale and personal one-to-one interactions. It is this interaction that is the most significant in learning, but also often the most important, and for a course to be truly massive, it must enable, and even encourage, hundreds or even thousands of these small interpersonal interactions.
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‘wrapped’ MOOCs, which postulate the use of a MOOC within the context of a traditional location-based course; the material offered by the MOOC is hence ‘wrapped’ with the trappings of a more traditional education. This is the sort of approach to MOOCs which treats them more as modern-day textbooks, rather than as courses in and of themselves.
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Our thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. Knowledge, therefore, is not acquired, as though it were a thing. It is not transmitted, as though it were some type of communication. You can’t ‘promote’ something simply by assembling course packages and sending them out into the world.
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The idea of a connectivist course is that a learner is immersed within a community of practitioners and introduced to ways of doing the sorts of things practitioners do, and through that practice, becomes more similar in act, thought and values to members of that community.
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So what a connectivist course becomes is a community of educators attempting to learn how it is that they learn, with the objective of allowing them to be able to help other people learn. We are all educators, or at least, learning to be educators, creating and promoting the (connective) practice of education by actually practicing it.
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he course design gradually began to look less and less like a traditional course, and more like a network, with a wide range of resources connected to each other and to participants. And the course became much less about acquiring content or skills, and much more about making these connections, and learning from what emerged as a result of them.
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Learning is a social activity, and that is why the picture of distance learning wherein each person studies from their own home, supported by a personal computer and desk videophone, is wrong.
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one of the keys is ownership. By that, what I mean is that the members of the community play a key role in shaping the community.
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It is not a place where the organizer provides material and the members consume it. It is a shared and constructed environment, where the members along with the organizers play roughly equal roles in content creation.
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The MOOC is for us a device created in order to connect these distributed voices together, not to create community, not to create culture, but to create a place where community and culture can flourish,
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People talk of ‘learning communities’ but strictly speaking there is no such thing as a ‘learning community’ – save, perhaps, the strained and artificial creations of educational institutions that try to cram classes into collectives, creating personal relationships where none naturally exist.
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The value of a community, however, and especially of a learning community, comes from the diversity in the community. Students gather around an instructor precisely because the instructor has knowledge, beliefs and opinions that the students don’t share. They gather around each other because they each have unique experiences. Fostering a learning community is as much a matter of drawing on the differences as it is a matter of underlining the similarities.
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To learn is not to acquire or to accumulate, but rather, to develop or to grow. The process of learning is a process of becoming, a process of developing one’s own self.
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ecent discussions of MOOCs have focused almost exclusively on the online community, with almost no discussion of the individual learner, and no discussion peer community. But to my mind over time all three elements will be seen to be equally important.
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We might also define three key roles in online learning: the student, the instructor, and the facilitator. The ‘instructor’ is the person responsible for the online community, while the ‘facilitator’ is the person responsible for the peer community.
