Reflections of a mooc unvirgin

I recently completed my first mooc, and I will soon receive the certificate to prove it.

Many people don’t think a certificate of completion means much, but this one will mean a lot to me. I put substantial time and energy into this course, so it will be satisfying to have something tangible to recognise it.

Before I signed up, I had decided to do a mooc because I was blogging about them but had never experienced one for myself. I considered doing Georgia Tech’s Fundamentals of Online Education via Coursera, but I wasn’t attracted to the introductory angle of the content. As it turned out, the course crashed under the weight of its own popularity, so I dodged a bullet there.

I also considered the independent(?) Educational Technology and Media mooc, but I was put off by its heavy connectivist approach. Not per se, mind you, but I was looking for more direction.

Eventually I settled on The University of Edinburgh’s E-learning and Digital Cultures mooc, because it targeted practising e-learning professionals who “want to deepen their understanding of what it means to teach and learn in the digital age”, not to mention the fact I was fascinated by its coverage of popular culture.

So my first learning – before I even began – was that all moocs are different. You can’t tar them with the one brush.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the EDCMOOC. In my opinion, it had a lot going for it. Having said that, however, every course has its pro’s and cons, and this one was no exception…

Pro’s

• The mooc was well prepared. The pre-information on the Coursera site was useful, the promotional video was informative, and both were reinforced by a welcome email upon registration.
   
• The virtual classroom environment was well structured. Not only were the content streams logically sequenced and accessible in advance, but the administrative aspects of the course were outlined under a dedicated “what, where, how and when” page. An announcement board kept us up to date, the discussion forums were easy to find, and the final assessment was explained clearly from Day 1.
   
• The pedagogical approach of the course combined elements of both instructivism and constructivism. Each topic included an introduction covering the central concepts, plus a resources page comprising several video clips (not of lectures, but of creative works) and readings. I appreciated the readings being classified as “Core” or “Advanced”, as this allowed me to focus my energies on the ones that mattered, while getting around to the others if I had the time and inclination.
   
• The duration of each topic was one week. This was enough time to get the work done, but not enough time to tempt you to sit on your laurels. I kept up to speed for the first 3 weeks, but I let the fourth week slip when real life got in the way. Thankfully the resources remained accessible, which allowed me to catch up afterwards.
   
• The duration of the whole course was 5 weeks, which again I found to be just right. After the novelty of the first couple of weeks wears off, real life competes hard for your attention. In all honesty, I think I would have dropped out if it were any longer.
   
• The course was supported by social media groups across several platforms, including Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. While I initially found this frustrating (having to bounce between them in case I missed out on anything), I now agree in hindsight that multiple platforms are a good idea – on the proviso that the Coursera-hosted forum remains the plenary. It makes no sense to me to force people onto one arbitrary platform which they otherwise would not use, and it was convenient to self-organise the 40,000 students into more manageable sub-groups.
   

• Through the discussions in the course, participation in the social media groups, and comments on my blog posts, I connected with some incredibly smart people from all over the world. These connections will enrich my learning experience well after the course has ended.
   

• Assessment for the course was crowd-sourced. Each participant was charged with peer assessing the digital artefacts of at least three fellow participants – and this was enshrined as a requirement for your own completion. The final score was an average of the peer scores.
   
• I used ThingLink for my digital artefact, which I had intended to try since I first heard about it over a year ago. This mooc gave me the nudge I needed. Incidental learning at its finest!
   
• The proof of the pudding is in its eating, and at the end of the course I can unequivocally say I learned plenty. Some of the learnings were implicit thoughts that were made explicit, while others were novel ideas to which I would otherwise have remained ignorant. I blogged about my learnings along the way, being mindful to draw out the practical applications of the somewhat academic concepts.
   

Cons

• With 42,000 participants, it was inevitable that the discussion forum would be swamped. I witnessed many participants talking at their fellow students rather than with them, and some discussion threads ran on for pages and pages. Of course, this became less of a problem over time as huge numbers of participants dropped out, leaving the keen beans to carry on the conversation.
   
• During Week 1 in particular, the discussion forum and social media groups were inundated with the likes of “Hi, I’m from Sao Paulo” and “Howdy from Texas”. While I’m a fan of social mores, I don’t specifically care where the 27,347th participant is from.
   
• Hand-in-hand with the “happy greeter” was the “lost soul”. A lot of participants expressed anxiety at being overwhelmed by the mooc – which I found surprising. Not only were the weekly instructions quite clear, but the target audience was e-learning professionals who are, presumably, seasoned adult learners.
   
• A bugbear of mine in any discussion forum is the “pretender” – ie someone who posts lofty statements with big words, yet devoid of any substance. There was no shortage of them in this mooc.
   
• At the other end of the extreme, other participants’ contributions were woefully inadequate. In one thread, for example, the discussion descended into a list of sci-fi movies; no explanation as to how they were pertinent to the conversation, but oh what a list!
   
• Another problem that popped up was the “parasite” – ie someone who signs up to a mooc just so they can spam the discussions with links to their own irrelevant content. Vomit.
   
• As far as the course content is concerned, I felt the focus on pop culture was perhaps too strong. While the instructors tended to end each topic with a question about its implications for e-learning, that was rarely followed up in the discussions. In my opinion, the participants roasted the same old chestnuts (such as the spectre of big brother and the inequity of digital access in the third world) instead of synthesising connections to the practice of education in their own world.
   

Suggestions for improvement

To be fair, the cons that I have listed above are not unique to the EDCMOOC, nor to online learning in general. I remember similar problems from my uni days on campus.

Nonetheless, they inform my following suggestions for improvement…

• Week 1 should be set aside as a social week to allow the happy greeters to get their social proclivities out of their systems. It may be tempting to set aside a pre-week for this purpose, but the truth is it will bleed into Week 1 anyway.
   
• The instructors need to be much more active in the discussions. I recommend they seed each week with a pinned discussion thread, which marks the official line of enquiry and discourages multiple (and confusing) threads emerging about the same concepts.
   
• More importantly, the instructors should actively prompt, prod, guide and challenge the participants to engage in critical analysis. Explication of the implications for e-learning must be the outcome.
   
• A moderator should delete the spam and ban the spammers.
   
• A support page and discussion thread should be dedicated to helping the lost souls, so that they don’t pollute the rest of the course with their problems.
   

All in all, I am glad to report my first mooc experience was a positive one.

I won’t rush out to do another one in a hurry, but that’s simply because I know how demanding they are.

But one thing’s for sure, I will do another one at some stage. I look forward to it!

Drivers of Yammer use in the corporate sector

Yammer has been quite a success at my workplace. Not off the charts like at Deloitte, yet very much alive and growing.

It warms my heart to see my colleagues asking and answering questions, sharing web articles, crowdsourcing ideas, gathering feedback, praising team mates, comparing notes on where to buy the best coffee, and even whining a little.

Every so often I’m asked by a peer at another company what they can do to increase the use of Yammer in their own organisation. I’m happy to share my opinion with them (borne from my experience), but thus far I have been cognisant of the fact that I haven’t cross-checked my ideas against those of others in the corporate sector.

So I recently invited 14 community managers from around the world to rate the key factors that drive Yammer use in their respective organisations. The results are summarised in the following graph.

While my sample size is probably too small to infer any significant differences among the factors, observation reveals a tiered arrangement.

The front runner is business champions. These enthusiastic users encourage the use of Yammer with their colleagues across the business. The importance of this factor is unsurprising, given the effectiveness of WOM in the marketing industry. Employees presumably trust their team mates more than they do HR, IT, or whoever “owns” Yammer in the workplace.

The next one down is another no brainer: internal promotion. Typical promotional activities such as newsletters, testimonials and merchandise not only raise awareness among the users, but also act as ongoing reminders. If WOM is the steam train, promotion is the coal that keeps it chugging.

Intrinsic motivation is obvious to anyone who knows the saying “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink”. In other words, you can unleash your business champions and push all the promotion you like, but if the individuals who comprise your target audience lack a collaborative attitude, they won’t use Yammer.

Rounding out the top tier is top-down support and participation. Not only is it important for the user’s direct manager to be enthusiastic about Yammer and participate in it him- or herself, but it’s also important for the CEO, CFO, COO, CMO etc to do the same. They must lead by example.

At the next tier down, informal support resources have some importance. I guess self-paced tutorials, user guides, tip sheets etc are less of an imperative when the system is so damn easy to use. Not to mention that just about everyone knows how to use Facebook or Twitter already, so in that sense they have prior knowledge.

User acknowledgement is also somewhat important. Everyone wants their questions to be answered, and perhaps attract a “like” or two. Otherwise, why would they bother?

The placement of Community Manager at this tier pleasantly surprised me, given the pool of respondents. Nonetheless, some sort of management of the forum is considered important in driving its use.

Integration of Yammer-based discourse into L&D offerings was also placed surprisingly low. I suspect that’s because only intrinsically motivated learners participate in it anyway.

Rounding out this tier, it appears a decent sense of netiquette is the norm in the workplace. You would be a clown to behave otherwise!

At the lower tiers, we see the factors that are considered less important by the respondents.

I guess a formal usage policy is irrelevant to intrinsically motivated users, while prizes, points and other forms of extrinsic motivation are similarly redundant. Same goes for activities and games such as “fun facts” and trivia quizzes.

And one thing’s for sure: a traditional project management approach characterised by a hard launch and follow-up training misses the mark.

In summary, then, we see that enterprise social networking is multifaceted. There is no silver bullet.

If your objective is to drive the use of Yammer in your organisation, you would be wise to focus your energy on the factors that offer the greatest return.

In the meantime, bear in mind that social forums grow organically. It takes time for individuals to see what’s in it for them and jump aboard.

Having said that, if the culture of your organisation is bad, it either needs to change or you should shift your efforts to something else.

Doctoring the Informal Learning Environment

Anne Marie Cunningham is a GP and Clinical Lecturer at Cardiff University, Wales. She authors the blog Wishful thinking in medical education, which she uses to advance thinking about the training of student doctors.

Recently Anne Marie blogged Location and Learning (which I have reproduced here) and she asked me whether or not I consider her central idea an example of an Informal Learning Environment (ILE).

My short answer is “yes and no” – which I will explain – but for the moment please read Anne Marie’s idea for yourself…

In the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about how we can support the learning that takes place when medical students are on placement.

We know that entering wards can be a daunting experience for students. They don’t feel part of a team. They don’t know who everyone is. They don’t understand what is happening. They don’t want to interrupt nurses attending to patients or junior doctors catching up with paperwork at desks. They see other members of the team wandering in and out of the ward but they don’t know what their role is. They don’t recognise the social worker or the pharmacist or the OT. They might not even know what their own role is. They miss out on opportunities to attend meetings and teaching sessions because they don’t know they are happening.

In fact they spend too long waiting around for someone else to turn up to teach them, and on activities that have little educational value. They generally have a haphazard learning experience.

But placements are very rich environments with many unique opportunities to learn. So what can we do?

Imagine instead that before coming to the ward the students had access to a network which let them find the profiles of all the staff who worked on that ward. They could see the timetables for teaching. They could even see what the last students who had been on this placement had seen and learnt. They can select what they would particularly like to gain from the placement, and this will become part of their profile which will also be available to all the staff on the ward.

The network will also contain links to information about initiatives that are happening in the ward to address patient safety and quality improvement. The students can see if there are opportunities for them to get involved in this work and learn about the input their colleagues have had in the past.

When they turn up on the ward the students check in. They can see the profiles of the staff who are working there and when they should be finishing, when they will be on call and what clinics or theatre sessions they will be doing that week. Their calendar updates with activities that are happening that day that they should know about.

The network that they are tapping into is the same one that all the staff in the hospital use to keep themselves up to date. The students can record their learning and their thoughts about how the ward works. Their input is valued by the staff on the ward and their fellow students from other disciplines.

Do you think this will happen soon? Why hasn’t it happened already? And how could patients use this network?

[Source: Location and Learning]

What a wonderful idea!

Given the realities of the workplace for student doctors, shifting the pedagogy – if ever so slightly – from formal to informal sounds long overdue.

I certainly support the idea of staff profiles. If they include the name, photo, role, expertise, work roster and contact details of each staff member, the student can identify the right SME for their problem and avoid wasting precious time on a wild goose chase.

I also support the idea of the student having their own profile, and connecting it to a personal blog. The blog provides the student with a vehicle to express what they hope to gain from their placement, record their experiences, reflect on what they have learned, and even voice what they have struggled with.

Other students could read the blog to find out how their fellow student is faring, and perhaps make a social connection. The administrators and teaching staff could also read the blog to evaluate the student’s experience and remedy any problems.

In addition to profiles and blogs, I would also suggest facilitating an open discussion forum. Unlike a blog (which may or may not be read by others) a discussion forum enables the student to push a question to the crowd, thereby leveraging the collective intelligence of the hospital.

Senior doctors and nurses could participate in the forum to contribute their expert knowledge and lead the students in the right direction. Of course the student can also share their knowledge by answering someone else’s question, and they can learn incidentally by reading the questions and answers of others.

The discussion forum would also be a suitable vehicle for promoting the various initiatives that Anne Marie speaks of, providing reminders about upcoming teaching sessions, advertising project opportunities, and sharing other hospital-related news.

Having said that, I think a big missing piece of this puzzle is a wiki or some other form of bulk content repository.

I would imagine that in a big institution like a hospital, knowledge is distributed everywhere – on scraps of paper, in folders on shelves, on a poster in the canteen, in people’s heads – which makes it really hard to find (especially when you need it). A wiki enables the hospital to centralise that content so that it can be retrieved quickly, easily and on‑the‑job via a mobile device.

I’m salivating over the thought of the kinds of resources it might contain!

Essentially, then, I would base the hospital’s ILE on three core components:

1. Wiki – the first port of call,
2. Discussion forum, the second port of call, and
3. Staff profiles, the third port of call.

Of course I recognise the importance of formal learning too. I’m not suggesting the hospital ditches face-to-face instruction, for example, with 3D animation. On the contrary, I believe formal and informal modes of delivery complement each other. The trick is determining which is best in each situation, and it might involve a combination of both – why not run a face-to-face demonstration and make the animation available in the wiki for future reference?

In the hospital, then, formal teaching sessions remain a core component of the student’s learning environment. They require support resources such as timetables, agendas and follow-ups.

Taking this one step further, the student’s shifts in the ward may also be considered a core component of their learning environment, as they are instances of on-the-job training. They require support resources such as a roster and perhaps an online check-in facility.

So Anne Marie’s wishful-thinking learning network for student doctors could look something like this:

As you can see, the interface segregates learning from its management.

The former comprises the ILE (wiki, discussion forum and staff profiles) plus elements of the FLE (work shifts and face-to-face teaching sessions). This zone is where the student goes to learn something.

The latter zone comprises the remaining components of the FLE. This is where the student attends to administrative matters (calendar, floor maps, 60-day checklist), assessment (quizzes, assignments, due dates, grades) and performance management (PMA, development plan, 360° feedback, performance appraisal, manager’s reports).

As an organisation shifts its pedagogy towards the informal end of the learning continuum, its ILE and FLE increasingly represent the distinction between the act of learning and its management.

However, organisations are rarely so extreme in their learning model, and some (like hospitals) probably never will be because formal instruction is so crucial.

So I see nothing wrong with “doctoring” the ILE by associating it with formal elements. ILEs and FLEs are flexible concepts that should be manipulated according to the contexts in which they will be used.

I know if I were a student doctor, I would completely immerse myself in this learning environment. I would get myself an iPad and carry it with me at all times as an indispensable learning aid.

I would check in every day. I would look up what was going on. I would attend teaching sessions. I would search content. I would browse. I would post queries. I would discuss. I would contact SMEs. I would blog. I would read other people’s blogs. I would check out my fellow students’ profiles and perhaps meet up for lunch.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced this idea is bigger than any individual hospital. It is something the Health Department should implement across the sector. Now.