MOOC Assessment

MOOC Assessment

The topic of student assessment is one that has been near and dear to my heart for several years now, both as a classroom teacher and in my current position as the assessment coordinator for the College of Education.  Through my professional experiences, I have grown to appreciate the significance of well-designed and valid assessment, and the great skill that is needed to design them.  Sadly, far too often teachers utilize poorly designed assessment instruments that provide little insight into actual student growth.  I will be the first to admit that during my time as a classroom teacher, I was far too often guilty of using a variety of meaningless and invalid assessment techniques; such as multiple choice tests.  But the reality is that most teachers have to deal with extremely large class sizes and a variety of external pressures demanding validation of student achievement, which too often forces teachers into gathering inauthentic assessment.  When you consider the exponentially larger class sizes of MOOC courses, the challenges of time and space and the ambiguity of MOOC course credit, the issue of assessment within the MOOC environment appears to be an unsettled enigma, with the lingering challenging of determining how to authentically assess student performance within the MOOC environment.

To me, the biggest question regarding assessment within the MOOC environment is how to authentically assess student performance while maintaining a feasible work load for the instructor(s).  Unfortunately, there is no one best assessment method for all courses.  The nature of the course plays a large role in determining how to best conduct assessment.  The MOOC that I am creating for AHE 602 lends itself well to experiential learning strategies and hands on student activities.   The activities that I have in mind for this class rely more on application, and cannot be adequately measured through an exam.  As such, the auto-graded multiple choice test that is commonly used in MOOCs is not a great option for me. Neither are the proctored exams that Parry describes.  I think that peer assessment is going to be a more valid option for my MOOC. I enjoyed reading Davidson’s article on crowd source grading.  Her concept seemed like a well-timed solution for my enigma.  I plan to have the student’s actively participate in peer assessment throughout the course.  As of this moment, I am not sure if I need to designing a document outlining peer assessment groups, or to allow that to form naturally

Like all courses, traditional or online, instructors must consider how to maintain academic integrity within the course.  Young raised several valid concerns regarding plagiarism and the potential for academic dishonesty within the MOOC environment.  The MOOC frontier is so new that most of the instructor efforts still revolve designing the MOOC courses.  It seems little has been done to ensure that students abide by academic conduct policies.  I openly admit that I have no solution to offer.  That is why that I am glad that my MOOC is a not for credit course.  If a student decides to cheat, they are really just cheating themselves out of learning experiences.

References

Davidson, C. N. (2009).  How to crowdsource grading. Retrieved from http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading

Parry, M. (2012). Edx offers proctored exams for open online courses. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/edx-offers-proctored-exams-for-open-online-course/39656

Young, J. (2012). Plagiarism in coursera. http://chronicle.com/article/Dozens-of-Plagiarism-Incidents/133697/

MOOC Pedagogy

Careertechnologies from James Hardin

My personal pedagogical beliefs were shaped over the course of my own education, teacher training and professional practice.  Throughout this time, these personal trials and experiences have allowed me to develop a personal pedagogy that I firmly believe in.  To this point, my personal pedagogical practices draw heavily from social constructivist theory.  I am a firm believer that knowledge is constructed through our interactions and exploration of the world around us.  As such, my personal pedagogy has led me to design my own courses in a way that draws heavily upon various instructional strategies that encourage active student participation and collaboration, and utilizes experiential learning methods such as project based learning and peer assessment.

Morris and Stommel state that much of current online instruction is nothing more than traditional pedagogical strategies that have been uploaded to the Internet, to the disservice of students.  To this point in my career, all of my teaching experiences have been in the face-to-face format, so I can provide no personal experiences validating these statements.  Furthermore, Krueger and Ross believe that online pedagogy should be drastically different from face-to-face pedagogy.  While I agree that online instruction should be much more than traditional instructional methods that have been transferred online, I am not sure how much I agree that a drastically different pedagogy is needed.  I would state that while instructional strategies intended for the online environment do need to be reconceptualized, I still believe that social constructivist’s theory provides a solid foundation for the creation of MOOC learning environment.  I firmly believe that my personal pedagogy would not drastically change when applied to the MOOC format.  In fact, I feel that the constructivist theory that I would employ could work well in this environment.  

Designing my MOOC

In the latter years of my k-12 teaching career I was a career discoveries teacher at the middle school level.  The content of this course was aimed at introducing students to the broad technological areas found in the 21^st century, and the career possibilities associated with those areas.  This was a fun course that I enjoyed teaching, and I think that when done correctly, it can provide students with useful skills.  With that in mind, the MOOC that I am going to create for AHE 602 is intended to provide participating students with the opportunity to explore a vast array of cutting edge technologies, and to acquire technologies skills that have many useful applications within various career fields.

Considering the nature of the MOOC format, I consider the connectivists learning theory to be an appropriate framework for the design of this class.  As the instructor of a MOOC, there is only so much interaction that I can have with the students, especially if it is a large MOOC.    As such, I think that collaboration among students will be critical to their learning experiences.  For this MOOC I hope to design learning activities that provide students with the needed content material and access to areas where they can collaborate.  DeBaise (2013) described a personal MOOC learning experience that created a “spider’s web” network of peers that fostered a rich learning experience.  This is the type of learning experience that I hope to create. 

At the moment, I intend to use the free Blackboard CourseSites program to host my MOOC.  It seems to me to be the easiest tool available at my disposal.  I intend to incorporate a wide variety of resources into the MOOC’s course material.  Video lectures, online content videos, as well as other documents including web resources will be used to disseminate content material.  In addition, I intended to provide the students with opportunities to use a variety of technology tools in order to provide meaningful learning opportunities and to foster collaboration.  Students will be required to utilize the journal and discussion board features incorporated into the course sites program.  In addition, the students will have assignments that require them to use Twitter as a means of communication and learning, and the students will develop electronic portfolio utilizing a still undetermined program (I am unimpressed with the portfolio feature in Blackboard).  Once a student has completed this MOOC, my hope is they will have met the following objectives:

·         Students will develop the ability to utilize social media in an professionally appropriate manner

·         Each student will identify a career areas that is of particular interest to them

·         Each students will develop a basic competence with standard computer operations and applications

·         Each student will utilize various technological tools in the creation of course modules and understand how those tools are utilized within the industry

·         Students will collaborate with other students to heighten the learning experience

References

DeBaise, J. (2013). Learn like an arachnid: Why I’m MOOCifying. Retrieved from http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/Journal/files/MOOCifying.html

 

Rock Stars!

            Ironically, the MOOC phenomenon has given rise to the phrase “rock star professors”, or “superprofessors”.  No offense to any college professor is intended, but it made me laugh.  Rees (2013) has described superprofessors as the prominently known professors who lecture in some of the most popular MOOCs currently available through companies such as Coursera and EdX.  The curriculum materials created by these rock stars are viewed in some cases by tens of thousands of students in a single academic term.  Furthermore, due to recent developments, in some situations the curriculum materials created by these superprofessors are spreading beyond the boundaries of a single online platform, to the traditional brick and mortar classrooms of various institutions nationwide.  These superstar professors have the opportunity to devise curriculum materials that could potentially reach farther than ever previously thought possible.

            A potential wide scale implementation and acceptance of MOOCs within the higher education industry could potentially force the redefining of the faculty role as we currently know it.  In a traditional course setting, professors invest a significant amount time during each academic term creating curriculum resources and interacting with students.  In this traditional format, college professors dedicate a significant portion of their time engaging with their students, and providing customized instruction and performance feedback.  In contrast, the MOOC phenomenon has given rise to an alternative definition of the role of the college professor.  The professors that utilize the MOOC format invest a great deal more time and resources than their traditional counterparts in the creation of the course structure and curriculum materials. Essentially, MOOC professors must develop all of the needed course resources at the onset of the course.   However, once the course starts, their role as the course instructor is much more minimal comparatively.  Since MOOC students have limited interactions with their professors, and their work is usually graded by a computer, MOOC instructors do not share the same set of responsibilities as their traditional counterparts, and infrequently interact with students. 

            When you ponder the further implementation of MOOCS on a wide scale manner, the use of MOOCs could potentially change the role of professors beyond the digital walls of the MOOC classroom, spilling over into the traditional brick and mortar classroom.  At San Jose State University (SJSU), faculty members are facing pressure to integrate MOOC courses into their existing curriculum (Kolowich, 2013).  A group of professors from the philosophy department at SJSU have united in an effort to stop the integration of these MOOC resources within their university, claiming that they are inferior to the traditional method of instruction, stating that this is nothing more than an effort to replace qualified faculty with cheap online instruction.  Rees (2013) provides a similar view, stating that the MOOC phenomenon has the potential to drastically cut labor cost. It is conceivable that as traditional institutions of higher education contemplate utilizing MOOC resources in lieu of their traditional class materials, the onus of creating curriculum materials could be removed from the course professor, essentially entering institutions of higher education into the leasing business in terms of curriculum materials.  Many within the field are worries that MOOC expansion could pose a serious threat to the traditional role of the college professor to essentially a class moderator.

           

Resources

Rees, J. (2013, July 25). The MOOC Racket. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/07/moocs_could_be_disastrous_for_students_and_professors.html

Kolowich, S. (2013). Why professors at San Jose State won’t use a Harvard professor’s MOOC. Retrieved from http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Professors-at-San-Jose/138941/