Presented at the Open Education Global Conference 2016 in Krakow, Poland on April 12 Abstract: In the fall of 2015, McGill University launched its first offering of Social Learning for Social Impact (SLSI), a 12-week group-based MOOC - or GROOC - hosted by non-profit MOOC provider, edX. Drawing on connectivist MOOC, social, and experiential learning principles, SLSI attempts to translate an ambitious social mission into an online platform for sustained social learning. As course facilitators, we are uniquely positioned to explore the origins and development of SLSI’s networked learning ecosystem designed with concerned citizens in mind. We discuss the current limitations and challenges of open online education practices, particularly in relation to group-based learning, and how this first iteration, which we call GROOC 1.0, attempted to overcome these by crafting a highly adaptable, participatory curriculum that positioned learners and facilitators as co-creators who can also inform the design and delivery of GROOC 2.0. We explore how course designers actively encouraged learners to subvert the constraints of the edX platform and even of SLSI’s formal curriculum so they might achieve their particular objectives. Similarly with the pro bono facilitators who were coached from the outset to anticipate confusion and uncertainty, trust their own judgment to resolve problems, and support one another, the call was to be subversive. The systems in place, it was acknowledged, might not be optimally suited to serve the learners. Furthermore, we discuss the technical elements that support and constrain the online infrastructure. For example, to support SLSI’s vision of group-based learning, edX released a “Team Forum” tool that - beyond helping learners form their initial teams - proved inadequate to foster the kind of group engagement necessary for sustained social initiative-building. This shortcoming prompted many learners (along with their facilitators) to emigrate to a combination of more suitable digital platforms and connectivity apps like Facebook and Google Apps to accelerate social learning for (eventual) social impact. We also discuss the feedback mechanisms embedded into the curriculum and the opportunities to course-correct, which, for the SLSI’s design team, was a clear priority, so that any real-time adaptations could be shared with facilitators. For example, open licensing for course content and the development of open education policy were issues raised by learners and facilitators in GROOC 1.0. Furthermore, we anticipate that McGill University will engage with the open education community to share insights about the implementation and outcomes of SLSI through conferences like Open Education Global 2016 as we plan for GROOC 2.0. Keywords: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); Group-Based Learning; Learning Facilitation; Social Learning; edX; Open-Source Software

1. When a MOOC became a GROOC
we all became co-creators
Alannah Fitzgerald, Ruchika Arore, Jessica Xiao,
Andras Lenart, Emilie Salvi
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gnuckx/4277702120 ..

2. MOOC with a call to action
http://www.mintzberg.org/sites/default/files/rebalancing_society_pamphlet.pdf

3. Facilitator feedback and feedforward
• Facilitator Issues
– Sustaining and scaling facilitator provisions
• Design Issues
– Cultivating a cMOOC within an xMOOC platform
“...social learning, it’s not a course, it’s not a pedagogy, for
me, it’s a culture.” – Carlos Rueda, GROOC co-designer, 2016

4. Social Learning for Social Impact
Group-based MOOC Overview:
#1: Engaging - Group Charge: “Find Your Team”
#2: Co-Creating - Group Charge: “Preparing Your Team”
#3: Designing - Group Charge: “Experimenting & Prototyping”
Live Session 1: Opening Global Conversation
#4: Scaling - Group Charge: “Scaling Your Social Initiative”
#5: Resourcing - Group Charge: “Storytelling for Resourcing”
#6: Assessing - Group Charge: “Developing a Logic Model”
The Groocathon
#7: Impact Gallery
Live Session 2: Closing Global Conversation

5. GROOC facilitators
• 31 pro bono facilitators of varied ages and ethnicities
• collectively speak 16 languages
• connected to social change networks across 52 countries
• social initiative experience and field expertise in educational
technology, education, management, arts and culture, and
community organization

6. Facilitator training, Montreal 2015

7. Co-Creation of a MOOC
“We who are working behind-the-scenes to create a platform
for the GROOC to actually happen care so much about your
experience. And we are very open to your feedback at all
stages of this GROOC to course-correct as we go. Henry has
taught us all about emergent strategy and we are trying to live
up to that and also for future GROOC experiences.”
(Anita Nowak, GROOCx Co-Designer, 2015)

8. MOOC facilitator model
“What I find really interesting about the GROOC facilitator
concept is that it is a community, it’s a community of
practice...in an educational sense, these are individuals who
are committed to the educational process. They’re along for
the ride in order to really tackle the learning itself and engage
with it in a really tactile way.”
(Alex Megelas, GROOCx Facilitator Trainer)

9. Facilitator-led research
post-GROOC 1.0
• Interviews and focus-group discussions with GROOC co-
designers and subject academics at McGill’s Desautels Faculty
of Management, and with MOOC learning technologists and
managers at McGill’s Teaching and Learning Services
• Online survey distributed to 26 GROOC facilitators (excluding
the GROOC research team) with a return rate of 50%

10. What were your main reasons for
becoming a GROOC facilitator?

11. Prior engagement with the social sector

12. SUSTAINING AND SCALING
FACILITATOR PROVISIONS

13. Facilitator issues going forward
• Training and developing expertise in MOOC facilitation
– GROOC as a cMOOC with an xMOOC platform
• Creating co-designing opportunities
• Documenting what does and doesn’t work with
facilitation
• Collecting and sharing impact data on teams
• Continuing contact with teams post-GROOC
• Creating facilitator certification opportunities
(badging?)
• Investing in paid-work opportunities to scale
facilitation

14. If given the opportunity, would you
volunteer again as a GROOC facilitator?
 “Yes. I find it is a great atmosphere of like-minded
individuals. It gives you hope that change is possible.”
 “Probably not. It was a fabulous experience and it is
unlikely I will ever again be able to put that amount of time
into a volunteer activity such as this.”
 “I definitely would but only if we work on improving the
planning and design to canalize volunteers’ strengths,
energy, motivations and enhance learning and impact. I
could be interested in participating in the planning and
design (I would love to)...”

15. Which aspects of the GROOC could be
improved for successive iterations?
 “I think we should rethink what is our target market. More
specifically, we only have a successful strategy when we are
providing the best product/service for a specific market
(clientele) and not the whole market. I feel we can further
tailor our course to a specific group instead for trying to
reach for anyone.”
 “Not thinking about it as a course. If we are trying to build a
social movement then how does that need to be
structured?”
 “The platform definitely. It should be more user friendly or
the course [content] could be hosted at edx and the forum
and/or team discussions in other platforms, more suitable
for that kind of activity.”

16. BRINGING A CMOOC TO AN
XMOOC PLATFORM

17. The race to platform education
“The value of MOOCs may not be the MOOCs
themselves, but rather the plethora of new
innovations and added services that are developed
when MOOCs are treated as a platform.”
– George Siemens, 2012

18. cMOOCs
• The original developers of the MOOC were George Siemens
and Stephen Downes who led Connectivism and Connective
Knowledge in 2008 (CCK08) with around 2,300 participants
for distributing and exploring connectivist pedagogy
(Siemens, 2005).
• The emphasis with CCK08 was on aggregated, open and
remixable resources, collaborative dialogue and co-
development of the MOOC.
• Downes would go on to characterise this type of MOOC as
a connectivist MOOC or cMOOC.

19. Teaching & Learning Services view on
bringing a cMOOC to a xMOOC platform
Adam Finkelstein: [The GROOC] was certainly one of the first
courses on a big xMOOC platform--being edX or Coursera--to
actually do a thing with group learning, to do some ambitious
thing with group learning. To be very fair to the MOOC space,
MOOCs came from a very collaborative environment, they
came from George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave
Cormier and what happened was they got twisted up
halfway through but that being said [...] they had to go down
a path, I think, to put them on a map in a way that the MOOCs
that George Siemens [et al. of CCK08] started just couldn’t get
traction at the higher levels of the university, once scale
started coming into the conversation [...] They [the CCK08-
type cMOOCs] were far more advanced than anything we’ve
done.

20. Co-Designer view on the edX platform:
Leslie Breitner: We decided that because our IMPM
[International Masters in Practising Management] classrooms
were all about group learning and the community [...] we
wanted to do that in the MOOC. And, Henry came up with the
name, GROOC, which is group-based MOOC. But getting the
structure, getting the infrastructure, the platform
architecture, and everything to work in a way that we would
be able to do that, was hell.

21. [Cont.]
I can’t blame it all on edX, who didn’t have the platform that
we needed nor could they create it apparently. And, I don’t
want to blame it on TLS [Teaching and Learning Services at
McGill] who had a much more narrow view of the possibilities
than we did.[...] Partly it was us because we had different
ideas among the four of us [GROOC co-design team] about
how we saw the groups, and how we saw what would
constitute a group, what wouldn’t. [...] So, we struggled with
that for basically the two plus years of preparation because
we didn’t know what the platform was going to be able to
accommodate when we finally got there.

22. edX CEO view on the teams tool
“We are also bringing social and collaborative learning into
MOOCs. We have seen that people who do a MOOC together
in a small group have a higher success rate than if they take it
[individually] as a MOOC. We launched a feature on edX called
teams where a student taking a MOOC can invite their friends
and up to 10 people can sign up as a team and they get a
private discussion area and social persona. Currently, we are
testing this 'Teams' feature in a course called social learning.
It is called a GROOC and we will now be making it available
in all our courses.” (Agarwal, 2016)

23. Facilitator views on the edX team tool
• Please rate your reaction to using the edX
platform.
– An average of 4 out of 10
• Please rate the software design of the team tool
in the edX platform.
– An average of 3.5 out of 10
• Communicating with peers via the edX team tool
was easy:
– 8.3% Agree
– 58.3% Disagree
– 33.3% Strongly Disagree

24. MOOC learners as beta testers
Current activity with MOOCs can be characterised as having
reached a beta phase of maturity. In much the same way that
software progresses through a release life cycle, beta is the
penultimate testing phase, after the initial alpha-testing
phase, whereby the software is adopted beyond its original
developer community.
• xMOOC learners are not necessarily as skilled as CCK08
MOOC learners with managing distributed online learning

25. Teaching and Learning Services on
collaborative learning support
• Adam Finkelstein: That’s when the resource page came
out. So it was sort of an ok we’ve got to do something to
give people some guidance. [...]
• Alannah Fitzgerald: Would you say that’s an extra week at
the beginning of the MOOC on how to get started?
• Claire Walker: Yes. I think there would be a week zero all
about how to work in a team and finding a team. There
wasn’t enough time for finding a team and figuring out how
to work together as a team.

26. Learning Technologist view on
“perpetual beta” culture at edX
Alexander Steeves-Fuentes: [...] you know, there’s a lot of,
well, “it’s in beta coming from them [edX]. And, that beta
seems to last for a stunningly long time.
Alannah Fitzgerald: [...] I think we’ve entered that age,
haven’t we, the age of everything being in beta indefinitely.
Alexander Steeves-Fuentes: But then the thing is that edX is,
then, restrictive on who they release it [code] to. [...] There’s a
tension there that we’ve always been, you know, Harvard
comes up with this new thing and says, well, it’s in beta so we
can’t really release it to everyone else. So, they give it to one
or two select universities, and so there’s no question that
there’s favouritism within the edX community. It’s not
completely balanced.

27. Be subversive
Henry Mintzberg: I never have expectations for new things
because I always get it wrong anyway and I never know what’s
going to happen with something brand new like that so I’m
not sure what our expectations were. …certainly not
disappointed. Did things come out that surprised me? Yeah,
the whole facilitator activity that you were involved with,
the enthusiasm, the nature of the learning – not just the
facilitators but at one point when I said be subversive, if
their platforms aren’t working just develop your own and
people took that up with a vengeance and I was saying it
about the edX platform and the edX people were promoting
my video about that and talking. They used that – they liked
that. That I was telling everybody to be subversive about the
very things they were doing.

29. Design Issues going forward
• Providing facilitators and learners with
support and tools in collaborative distributed
learning
• Building a parallel platform to edX for social
learning
• Critiquing the edX platform culture with the
open-source dictum: “release early and
release often, and listen to your customers”
(Raymond, 2001)

30. References
• Mintzberg, H. (2015). Rebalancing Society: Radical Renewal Beyond Left,
Right, and Centre. Berrett-Koehler: Oakland, California pdf version.
• Bhattacharyya, R. (2016). edX now offers complete programmes online,
not just individual courses: CEO Anant Agarwal. Retrieved March 3, 2016,
from http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/interviews/edx-now-
offers-complete-programmes-online-not-just-individual-courses-ceo-
anant-agarwal/articleshow/50632132.cms
• Raymond, E. (2001). The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and
Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. O'Reilly & Associates,
Inc. Sebastopol, CA, USA
• Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age.
International Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning,
2(1). http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/october2003/chung/chung.html
• Siemens, G. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Elearnspace. Retrieved
from http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-
platform/

31. Thank You
Comments and questions welcome:
Alannah Fitzgerald: a_fitzg@education.concordia.ca
Ruchika Arore: roaminglondon@gmail.com
Jessica Xiao: jessica.xiao@mail.mcgill.ca
Andras Lenart: andras.lenart@mail.mcgill.ca
Emilie Salvi: emiliesalvi15@gmail.com
Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/AlannahOpenEd/
Twitter: @AlannahFitz