Typically, I enroll in at least one MOOC per year to get inspired about asynchronous, distance learning design. Not only does it provide me with an opportunity to be in the student seat, but it also exposes me to a community of knowledge and fresh perspectives. Also, it affords me a chance to see what types of technologies and design elements are used to deliver information and motivate students to completion. I can honestly say that I have taken 6 MOOCs since 2013 and successfully completed 5 of them. Recently, I have taken a MOOC with a two friends to study the effectiveness of MOOCs as a model for professional development. We have shared many reflective discussions about the MOOC, but one thought that keeps circling around my brain is the absence of openness in MOOC design.

Based on my experiences, academic articles and my scope as an instructional designer, I have compiled a list of MOOC design recommendations.

1. Know Your Audience.
   • Cast a large net to understand who your prospective learners and their needs, motivations, and interests.
   • For example, if your target audience is PreK-12 educators, would you launch a MOOC in the summer?
2. Conduct a Needs Assessment.
   • Survey prospective learners to meet learning gaps.
   • Determine if your course will be teacher-centered or learner-centered.
   • For example, is the course author guiding content design because they are a super-star in the field? Will people enroll in this course only because the course author is highly regarded in the field?
3. Utilize Data to Drive Course Design.
   • Establish a relationship with an Instructional Designer or Design Team.
   • Develop learning objectives supporting the needs and expectations of prospective learners.
   • Design assessment on learner’s needs and interests.
     • Peer Review activities are very constructive for demonstrating knowledge and authentic application.
     • Quizzes and Summative Assessments are well suited for competency-based learning outcomes.
     • Academic literature supports problem- and project-based learning in MOOCs
     • Social learning opportunities within the learning platform to support collective-knowledge and communication.
   • Incorporate design elements including high-quality and professionally developed resources.
     • Videos are extremely common in MOOCs and require thoughtful production to keep learners engaged.
     • Design for diversity.
   • Include rubrics to ease grading expectations and to guide peer-to-peer activities.
   • Determine the length of the course and anticipated hours of learning per lesson/week.
   • Assess the quality of the learning design and student outcomes through an iterative design process.
     • Monitor and gather social media activity, learning platform analytics, video and media data, and assessment data.
     • Offer a mid- and/or end- of course survey.
4. Engage in Human Interactions.
   1. Utilize Social Media platforms, especially blogs, Twitter and Facebook groups.
      • It creates content development, community, sharing, and helps to ensure that learning is more than a one-time event.
   2. Show visible support through personalized course announcements and discussion forums from the course instructor and/or TAs.
5. Share and Evolve as a Community.
   1. Keep the communication flowing to the learning community through social media platforms and end of course email announcements.
   2. Share course findings for other MOOC design teams, the OER community, and academic literature.

Have you designed a MOOC or enrolled in a MOOC that made you reflect on the design? What are some best practices or recommendations for MOOC design to share for the greater good? I look forward to hearing from you!

1. Week 1: Why Open Matters.
   • We started off with a BANG! and excitement was in the air, or least for me it was. Our Twitter hashtag was very active, learners were posting in course discussion forums who they are and why they are interested in participating and we were individually blogging about our niche in the Open community. Here’s what I shared at the end of the week, Applying OER to Design.
   • We learned foundational knowledge of OER and enjoyed an informal, casually-staged interview of the course instructors, David Wiley and George Siemens.
   • After viewing the course content, we were dropped off into supportive and relevant external content, including a few odd videos (something about a large cookie and a screencast with a distracting desktop background of what looked like planet Mars) from other OER evangelists.
   • Though I was engaged with the content, I was easily distracted by the looseness and the misalignment of the resources. A summary, instructor commentary or simple instructions on how this curated work was collected, vetted, and aligned to the lesson outcomes would have gone a long way. For example, there is an external content page with a video and the following text written at the bottom of the screen, “I discuss the importance of openness and the role it plays in knowledge, communication and learning.” Who is “I” and why should I watch his screencast?
   • By the end of the lesson, we received a course announcement encouraging us to share our blogs and summarizing course content to prepare us for the next lesson.
2. Week 2: Copyright, the Public Domain and the Commons
   • With the announcement generating me to remain engaged and motivated in the course, I watched the next set of informal, casually-staged interview about the dystopian, copyright regime. It was quite interesting and I enjoyed David’s and George’s perspectives.
   • Realizing that the course structure would include interviews followed by a series of loosely aligned resources, I began to skim and select the most meaningful resources to my interest and practice.
   •  Since I didn’t pay for the course, I remained active by blogging end of lesson reflections, Stewards of Sharing, and joining the conversation on Twitter.
3. Week 3: The 5R’s, CC, and Open Licensing
   • I almost missed this lesson! We failed to receive  additional course announcements from the instructors for the remainder of the course. This was pretty concerning. How are learners to stay engaged in the MOOC (which is already hard considering its a MOOC) when it appears that no one is facilitating or engaging the dialogue? Did I have a different experience because I didn’t pay for the full version of the course?
   • Same interview style, same clothing, and same room to deliver content. However, the 5R’s is where David Wiley really shines. Again I was engaged with the content, but the design of this course began to weigh on me. Anyway, I still took some time to reflect and post in my blog, Awareness of the aaRRRRRgh’s.
   • Also, there was some weird coding and formatting issues in the course LMS. I’m not sure if there was course update or if there were issues with my access. Either way, it was hard to navigate Wiley’s keynote address video.
4. Week 4: Creating, Finding, and Using OERs
   • At this point, we were mid-way through the course. According to the syllabus, we were to have a metacognitive reflection on processes and engage in OER evangelism on our campus’. Even though I did both, I’m not sure we had enough course substance to begin advocating for OER. It’s challenging to go from foundational knowledge building to articulating practice in 2-3 weeks.
   • Same interview style, same clothing, and same room to deliver content. Maybe mix it up and put in a green screen?
   • The most value I had in this lesson was reading other’s blogs and resources, specifically on “Open Pedagogy”. I began to rely on the Open community to keep me motivated to complete the course.
5. Week 5: Research on OER Impact and Effectiveness
   • Blah, blah, blah.
   • So, this lesson I took the least amount of notes.
   • I stopped watching the videos. Instead, I read the transcripts.
   • Change your clothes! Change the background of your interviews! Maybe go to the bar and talk about OER research design over a few beers…This is a crazy 6-week long, marathon interview!
   • Did the instructors forget about this course? No reminder or check-in announcements?
   • Hello, is anyone out there?
6. Week 6: The Next Battle for Openness: Data, Algorithms and Competency Mapping 
   • By the end of the course we were to create a OER-module with only OER resources. While I took this course, I have been working on 2 course revisions. I revised an entire course with OER resources, but I’m not sure that I was able to do that from taking this MOOC. Of course, I learned the value of OER, but to go from foundational knowledge to articulation to practice within 6-weeks is a bit of a stretch with the materials and resources presented, especially if you are new to OER.
   • Lesson 6 talks about the future of OER in terms of big data, and the course ends there. Where do we go from here? It seems that lesson 6 is a huge topic, and not specifically aligned to the course outcomes. Hmmmm. I love learning analytics and data, to discuss a mash-up of OER and data was a dream come true… maybe a new MOOC?
   • If data needs to be open and transparent, I beg to ask, will we see the data on this MOOC? How much effort and energy was created in blog or twitter communication? What were the activity levels generated by students in this MOOC? Did activity levels drop off with the lack of course announcements? What were our most discussed topics? Did we form our own network? Will we continue the conversation?

I would love to hear feedback from the rest of the participants in this MOOC. I realize that MOOC are design challenges within themselves. However, after successfully completing 5 other MOOCs, I feel that this particular course has a lot of opportunity to improve. What do you think?

Research questions can be revealing.  Areas of focus provide insight into how we define value. When we choose to invest time and money to pursue a question, we are declaring the outcome important before we even start. I did a command F search on the Open Education Group OER research page to see if Stephen Downes was blowing smoke about the narrow focus of past research. He says it’s skewed towards grades and outcomes. This very unscientific test suggests that he’s not off base:

• the word “grade” appeared 16 times
• the word “exam” appeared 27 times
• the word “test” appeared 10 times
• the word “drop” appeared 7 times

I’m with Stephen on this. It may be the lingering effects of Jesse Stommel’s recent declaration on why he doesn’t grade. It may be the influence of the Ontario students pursuing the Exponential Learning project in our SXD Lab. Either way, at best, this is an unnecessarily narrow definition of value. And, this is on top of the fact that open education research is being pursued in disparate zones. Martin Weller illustrated this beautifully in his recent post Mapping the Open Education Landscape.

Re-defining value in open education

So how does future open education research define value?

I am curious about the current research David Wiley described: a comparision between experience of an educator involved in the design or curation and one who adopts directly. I will be very surprised if there is no correlation between direct involvement and a deeper experience. Have you ever had a conversation with Robin DeRosa!? But again, history repeats itself. The bottom line of this research is the difference in student outcomes (read: grades) in these two scenarios.

At eCampusOntario, we have something called the Student Experience Design Lab. The lab was developed by a group of Ontario students and the mantra that they chose is so revealing. Their work is to design purposeful learning for a meaningful life.

Education is about so much more than grades. Our students know that. So let’s take their lead and meet them where it matters. This is our challenge as the next generation of open education researchers.

And, this conversation needs to start with a shared understanding of values. The values are not an add-on. Our values are the foundation. The 5 Rs are the tools we use to live those values everyday. Open is a way of doing everything. This is our open education house.

So … roommates?

Section 1

Section 2

1.  thisisgraeme – History of Māori Literacy and Numeracy: Key events and initiatives
2.  ACE - Fifty Years of Learning: A history of adult and community education in Aotearoa from the 1960s to the present day
3. Tertiary Education Commission – Getting Results in Numeracy and Literacy

As is often the case with MOOCs, the interactions with participants and the input sessions from Wiley and Siemens collectively helped form my own learnings for the course. However, because the course was an introduction, it avoided certain controversial ideas around commercial vs. non-commercial CC licenses, for example, that often make a course like this more interesting.

For me, edX was a distraction (a necessary evil), clumsy in design, and awkward to navigate (at time impossible on mobile devices). I much prefer the simplicity of referring to a public page to review content and the ease of using social media (Twitter) to converse about the content with others. Also, I often felt uncertain not knowing for sure whether or not I was meeting course objectives according to how I was supposed to upload information to edX. I never relied on any feedback in edX (if I ever received any), since I stopped checking after about the third week.

But I remain appreciative to those involved in offering #OpenEdMOOC and recommend it to anyone interested in the beginning stages of thinking about open education and how it might relate to one’s own profession practice and learning.

But first, I want to go over some unique considerations for our learner hubs. The method I describe here has some extra steps involved due to some of the parameters I wanted to have for the hub. You don’t have to have any or all of these parameters in mind. But what I wanted to have unique for these hubs included:

• No wall of text. It is pretty easy to dump all course blog posts in one place and have a never ending scroll of text. But that is hard on the eyes and a little counter productive to getting people to connect. Also a bit dehumanizing to the individual posts.
• Link back to individual websites. The wall of text also discourages people from going to individual blogs, and seeing them as unique individuals. So I wanted to have a theme that at most displayed the post titles, linking back to the source website.
• Images or graphics to humanize each link. If at possible, I wanted pictures of people to link back to their blogs. This introduced a few unique challenges with technical limitations, but I will discuss work-arounds below.

The basic flow of the work would be that participants that want their work to go into the Hub (this is voluntary) would fill out a form to get me the details about their blog. I would get the results of that form. I would then create a Category for each person (based on the name or a pseudonym they give me), attach a featured image to that category (one that they choose), connect that category to an RSS feed from their blog, and let the magic happen. That way, when they create a post, an image of them with a link to their blog post is added to an image grid of blog posts. I love the results, but the process to get there is a little more involved than I thought it would be.

Setting Up the Hub

With all of that in mind, I selected a theme and some plugins to make those goals happen. Somewhat.  Here is what I chose:

• FeedWordPress plugin. This is a must have for the Hub – see Alan’s instructions above.
• Morphology Lite Theme. This one had a nice image-based front page blog grid, although you can’t read the titles until you mouse over each image individually. That part is a bit annoying – I would like to find one that has the image with the text imposed over it. But this theme does the basics of what I need it to do well.
• Category Featured Images Extended plugin. This allows you to associate an image with a category – this is part of the process for creating the grid front page that I will get into below. FeedWordPress can’t pull in featured images, and most people don’t use them anyways, so this is a way to get the images that the front page of Morphology Lite needs added automatically
• Ajax Search Lite plugin – as the YogaMOOC Learner hub grew, it became hard to find certain people’s work. This plugin seems to work well as an intuitive search. See the results here. However, I couldn’t get it to work on OpenEdMOOC, which had more plugins than YogaMOOC. It may not play well with some plugins.

The first step was to install Morphology Lite and set up my installation like their demo was set-up – they have some handy instructions here. For YogaMOOC, the blog hub is the front page. For OpenEdMOOC, the blog hub is not the front page. It can be set up either way. One thing to note: there is a setting to tell how many images are on the front page (found in Appearance > Customize > Blog Options > “Image Post Template Count”), and it is initially set pretty low. If you are expecting a lot of posts, you might want to set it high (I currently have YogaMOOC set to 600 with no problems).

Next is to set up the FeedWordPress plugin. I pretty much follow Alan’s instructions above except for one change: I don’t set a default category for all syndicated posts. I do that for each participant individually so they get their own unique category (and make sure all incoming categories are converted to tags as Alan’s instructions say). The reason for this will become apparent below.

Also, you can choose to set up the syndication update scheduling how you like. Because the OpenEdMOOC Hub is smaller, I have it set up like Alan recommends. Because the YogaMOOC is so large, there are typically a few problems with updating automatically. I have to update that one manually each day to deal with those issues.

The Category Featured Images Extended plugin pretty much works right out of the box, but I do recommend setting up a Global Fallback Image, which I will go into below.

The Ajax Search Plugin can be configured how you like, but I recommend making sure to turn on any option that says to search Categories as well.

To get the data from the participants, I created a Google Form and embedded it in a page with some basic instructions and a link to more detailed instructions for those that need it. I just collected the information that I needed – but getting user images is a bit more difficult. Depending on our course, you may want to set up a different system for collecting user images.

The final part of the set-up was to create an initial post that contained the instructions for adding blogs to the hub. I kind of see this post as the cut-off point for older posts – anything older then this was probably not created for the course and can be removed from the Hub. This is up to you of course – you can keep older posts if you like. But this initial post also serves as a visual placeholder to make sure your blog display limit is high enough – if you don’t see the post at the end, then turn up the limit. I also use this post to create the global fall back image for the hub. I set up a default category for the blog, and then add an image branded for the course. The key is to check the “set as global image” option. when editing the Category to add the default image. This will set your course iamge as the default image for anything that doesn’t have one.  This can help you to see any feeds that you set up incorrectly: if you see the image where it shouldn’t be, this signals you that something is wrong with that feed because it is falling back to the default.

Adding People to the Hub

This is where the time consuming part happens. It only takes a minute or two to set up each person, but once you get a long list of people it can add up.  However, this is a time commitment that decreases over time once most people in the course that are going to sign up for the hub are signed up.

Since I used a Google form to collect information, I can get the results in a nice convenient spreadsheet. This is where the fun begins. Some people fill out the form great, others miss a lot. I try to extract a name, a link to a blog feed, and an image for each person. The name and image can be flexible, but if the blog link doesn’t work or has no RSS feed, I mark it as a problem and move to the next one. Additionally, I try to respect what people put in the form. If they say they are using a course tag instead of a full blog, but there is no tag, I mark it as a  problem and move on. Once I get through the whole list, I send an email to those with problems with links to help them their issues (typically a form email with everyone BCC’d on it).

The first step is create a category for each person based on their name (or pseudonym if they choose). Sometimes I have to look at their email address or Twitter account to get a fuller name in order to make sure there aren’t several “John”s or whatever in the system (since some people only seem to enter their first name). As soon as you add a new category, it appears at the top of the list – very convenient. I click on the edit link immediately to add the default image for this participant’s category:

The “add image” option can be found near the bottom of the edit category page. Something to think about for images in the Morphology Lite theme: the system displays the image at full size on the front page. This will lead to a chaotic patchwork effect for images of different sizes. If you like that, then no problem. I really wanted to have an organized grid, so I manually crop and resize each image to 240px by 240px. This takes time, but gives a good grid for the final product.

A quick note on finding images. I tell people to have the image they want on their about page of the blog they use, but not everyone does that. Some of them I have to search the source code for an avatar that is hidden (WordPress loves to do this for some reason). Sometimes I have to pull one of the images off the header or sidebar of the blog. But since many of these are stock images within the popular themes, those run out quickly. So then I look for their Twitter avatar if they have one. But sometimes (more often than you would believe), I come up with no images – anywhere. So I basically run their name through jdenticon to get a unique image and move on.

Once you have an image associated with the category and have it updated, you should see it on the Category page:

The Next step is to go to the Syndication area to add the blog to the Hub. This is where it can get tricky as well. Not all blogging services work the same. WordPress works the best for full blogs and tags/categories. Blogger will also work for full blog, but you have to do some link trickery to get Labels (their version of tags/categories) to work (see Alan’s instructions on this one). Some services like Wix, Weebly, etc are just downright problematic at best. They might need RSS feeds turned on for the whole blog, and often RSS feeds don’t work well at all for tags/categories. See Alan’s instructions again on finding tricky RSS feeds.

Once you have the feed, you will need to add it to the syndication area found here:

If a participant is using a full blog, then you usually pick the first one in the list that comes up when you click “Add.” If they are using WordPress tags/categories, you will usually have to scroll down to the third Option on in the list (which is the feed specifically for the category):

Once the feed is added, I will typically add the participant category right away while their name is still fresh in my mind. Scroll down to find the feed you just added. Of course, if you have a large class this list might get long after too long. If you are adding several and are doing them one at a time by following these directions, you can do a CTRL + F to search the page for “none” and this will take you to the new one you just added in the list since it (theoretically) shouldn’t have updated yet. Click on the “Categories” link under the feed you just added:

Then scroll down that page to find the category list, look for the person’s name you just created, click the box next to them, and save:

This will connect their category named after them (which is attached to their image) to their specific feed that you just added. What I usually do after this is go back to syndicated websites, search for the new feed again, and click the “Update Now” button next to it. This lets me check to see if everything is working while also clearing out the “none” next to the “last update” label so that I can search for the next feed I add easily. Once that is finished, it should tell you how many posts were pulled in:

If you are using Morphology Lite, there is still one step needed to add blog posts to the front page. Morphology only displays posts on the front page that are set to the post format of “Image.” FeedWordPress pulls in all posts as a “Standard” post format, even if you tell it to use the “Image” post format. That feature just doesn’t work in Morphology for some reason. However, it does give you the ability to moderate posts since you have to change each post to the correct format before it appears. Sounds weird, but you would be surprised how much non-course stuff I have gotten in the Hubs (resumes, recipes, and randomness, oh my!).

You can find the posts you need to update easily in the Posts list – Image post formats have an image symbol next to them, and the new ones just added should be missing it:

Click edit to update the post. Then change the post format from “Standard”:

To “Image”:

Save, and you are done.

Alternatively, once you get a large number of posts, it may be hard to go into the post list and find one or two new posts hiding in hundreds of links. You can go to the Categories page and use the search bar to find the category you just added, then click on the number in the Count column to just display those posts from that category:

Then I usually like to go to the hub to make sure the new smiling face is in there, just to make sure:

That is about it – repeat until everyone is in. I will also send out a mass email to all that I added successfully as well as a mass email to those that had problems so that they will all know where they stand. A quick note: if people update their post on their blog, FeedWordPress will also update the related info on your Hub. This will reset the post Format back to “Standard,” and the post will no longer appear on the front page. You might want to go through the full post list from time to time to catch these older updated posts.

I tend to go through the moderation process each morning just to make sure it doesn’t pile up.

Hope that covers it all – I will update if I run across anything I forgot.

Matt Crosslin

Matt is currently the Learning Innovation Coordinator with the UT Arlington LINK Research Lab. His research focuses on Learning Theory, Innovation, and learner empowerment. Matt holds a Ph.D. in Learning Technologies from the University of North Texas, a Master of Education in Educational Technology from UT Brownsville, and a Bachelors of Science in Education from Baylor University. His research interests include instructional design, learning pathways, sociocultural theory, heutagogy, virtual reality, and open networked learning. He has a background in instructional design and teaching at both the secondary and university levels and has been an active blogger and conference presenter. He also enjoys networking and collaborative efforts involving faculty, students, administration, and anyone involved in the education process.

http://www.mattcrosslin.com