13. Anticipations Actualizations
Coordinate work:
“So those pieces were there: I had the
content, I had the interactive platform, I
had the exercises that would give
automated feedback to an almost
unlimited number of people.
So the only thing that was missing,
really, was a way to sort of stitch them
all together”
Weekly mails to coordinate
activities and make people
aware
MOOC blog working as
archive
Mailing list to form groups
Connect participants in
different rounds of the
MMOOC:
“Provide a loose structure and a cohort
of learners to study with, not to enforce
a rigid progression that must be strictly
adhered to”.
14. The study group MIT
6.189
A Gentle Introduction to
Python
Marisa Ponti
15. Anticipations Actualizations
Engage learners in social interactions like A Facebook-like platform where the “point
in social media
is to study together, not to trade pictures
and jokes”,
Reward engaged learners: “ who have
been answering questions regularly,
frequently and quickly… who are
engaged and spend time just answering
questions on this topic …They are team
workers.
Signalling good responses as “best
responses” and awarding medals.
Show how learners are progressing in
their learning journey and develop soft
skills, without using grades or transcripts
Individual scorecard calculating skills such
as problem solving, teamwork, and level of
engagement
21. Anticipations
Actualizations
Engage learners in a an immersive
experience: “to let you focus on what
matters: the lesson, your code, and what
you're building”.
A web console where to write, submit and
save code.
Provide a feedback loop, because: “it's
easier to learn when you can see you're
doing. For most screen resolutions, you
can now always see a visual preview of
any webpage you are coding, or a
terminal output of your code”.
A display showing the output of submitted
code, or providing instant feedback to the
code.
Provide help when learners are stuck.
Q&A Forum
22. Conclusions
• Delegation to the artifacts suggests
decentering of authority
• How facilitation is performed is
discursively organized through actual
sociotechnical connections
23. It’s over:
Thank you!
Research graciuosly supported through
the Swedish Research Council
Contact me at marisa.ponti@ituniv.se
Marisa Ponti
Editor's Notes
The Mechanical MOOC (hereinafter MMOOC) called A Gentle Introduction to Python is an open and free eight-week course offered for the first time in October 2012. The MMOOC offers independent adult learners without previous knowledge of programming the opportunity to learn the basics of this programming language. At the time I started this study about 5,700 participants signed up for the course.
Un unbundled infrastructure supports this MOOC.The MMOOC is offered by a group of open educational organizations, including Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) (p2pu.org), OpenStudy (www.openstudy.com), Codecademy (www.codeacademy.com), and MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu). Each organization plays a specific role in the MOOC: P2PU manages a mailing list to coordinate learning activities, OpenStudy provides a study group where learners encountering difficulties can ask questions and receive responses from their peers, Codeacademy provides exercises for practicing coding in Python and for self-assessment, and MIT OCW provides resources including videolectures and other academic materials. However, in the unbundled platform, also called "unplatform" (Carson, 2012b), the organizers hoped to bring together the best open educational resources (OER) available without having to create something new. They believed that reusing OER would bring a significant cost advantage and would constitute a model that could empower more open education projects to experiment with MOOCs. The MMOOC organizers believed that online learning tools have become robust enough to be used with a minimum amount of coordination, and that learners could use these tools and help each other in their learning process without a central authority
Using non-participant observations, reading documents openly available on the net and conducting few interviews
Your car slows down whether you like it or not when you pass over that speed bump. Speed bumps, the sleeping policemen,prAs Bruno Latour put it: the engineers’ program is delegated in concretehttp://books.google.com/books?id=zKqxK8s_EBYC&pg=PA206&lpg=PA206&dq=speed+bump+delegate+law&source=bl&ots=T0iK-XYW5v&sig=XWSeed6SedTbMiq0OtkKqSxGIK8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UbHNUt39JYHK2gWS4YG4Dw&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=speed%20bump%20delegate%20law&f=false, p. 207
Coordination takes the material form of weekly mails
The next section describes how the designers of OpenStudy inscribed their value of learner engagement in the study groups by embedding online reputation mechanisms that structure a process of peer recognition to support participant engagement.
This kind of informal assessment is performed through a combination of web analytics data and data from crowdrating. Web analytics include data such as number of users, number of questions and answers, frequency of asking questions and giving answers, and time on site. Crowd rating is a form of peer recognition based on offering medals to participants giving good responses to their peers’ questions (Figure 3).
The next section describes how the designers of OpenStudy inscribed their value of learner engagement in the study groups by embedding online reputation mechanisms that structure a process of peer recognition to support participant engagement.
http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/python
The delegation of facilitation to the three artifacts suggests decentering of authority and responsibility, most often inscribed in the technical design of the artifacts. Redistribute facilitation by eliminating teacher-student interactions:Connectivist slant assumes that learners have access to powerful networks and they are literate and confident enough to exploit these network to complete their tasks.It is possible to off-load cognitive, social and coordinating functions to artifacts.The ability of learners to take learning devices and appropriate them for their own learning needs The ability of learners to take ownership of their physical learning environment and enhance learning and creativity However, additional forms of interaction may enhance teacher and student interaction, but these come at a cost of time and/or money. In this sense, this no-frills MOOC can be used as a supplement by students or by teachers to the many other forms of learning opportunity afforded on the net through either formal or informal learning opportunities.
