Presentation by Patrick McAndrew and Rebecca Ferguson given at the 40th anniversary of the Computers and Learning research group CALRG40) at The Open University on 19 October 2018.

1. Patrick McAndrew, LTI Director of Research
Rebecca Ferguson, Senior lecturer
Vision:
Teams can teach any number
of students at a distance

2. Conceptions of teaching

3. Beliefs
• Distance learning works
• Anyone can learn

4. Foundations
• Materials based learning - Derek
Rowntree [get book]
• Communication - [Robin Mason,
Jenny Preece, Diana, Michael
Moore]
• SOL [Find the book again!]

5. @scale
… there are 165 million people
enrolled in tertiary education.
Projections suggest that that
participation will peak at 263 million
in 2025. Accommodating the
additional 98 million students
would require more than four major
campus universities (30,000
students) to open every week for
the next fifteen years.
Daniel, J (2012) Dual-mode universities in higher education: way station or final
destination?, Open Learning, 27:1, 89-95.
PhotobyFranckV.onUnsplash

6. Support that scales
Reference?

7. Success at (moderate) scale
I chaired the OU's first major
elearning course, T171, in
1999 with nearly 15,000
students. This involved a
number of strategic shifts in
the OU to make it an online
provider. (Martin Weller)

8. What the data say

9. Changes in approach
Communication
Bridging
Success

10. Sustained approach
Reference?
OpenLearn launched in
2006 and averages
44,000 visitors a day.
They hit the 60 million
visitors mark last week

11. Where next?
Challenges to universities?
Alternative pedagogies?
Changes in support models?
Different attitudes?

12. Pedagogy at scale
Educators identified affective benefits of
teaching in MOOCs; they also saw
opportunities for increased access to
resources, and a motivation to develop
their teaching practices.
Educators’ blogs and weekly emails to
enrolled learners provided opportunities
for them to express their feelings about
teaching such large groups. A sense of
pride and excitement emerges from these
messages, and a sense of joy that it is
possible to share personal passion and
enthusiasm with learners worldwide.
Sharples, M. & Ferguson, R. (2014). Innovative Pedagogy at Massive Scale:
Teaching and Learning in MOOCs. EC-TEL 2014.
Video – http://bit.ly/2RHwyyG

13. MOOC priority areas
Make use of effective distance learning
pedagogies Pay attention to interaction
between students, tutors and material;
provide structured tasks to guide learners;
offer motivating videos and broadcasts;
ensure that teaching material is carefully
crafted.
Offer well-designed assessment
Include constructive feedback to students,
feed forward, and recognition of
achievements.
http://intranet6.open.ac.uk/iet/main/supporting-ou/quality-enhancement-report-series

14. Developing expertise
Develop educator teams Producing and
presenting a MOOC requires close
collaboration between academic teams,
producers and academic librarians on
issues such as copyright and licensing of
resources for MOOCs, support for MOOC
design, access to resources and support
for digital literacies
Identify and share effective learning
designs Aim to minimise distractions that
do not support design objectives by
organising resources, enabling creative
expression in tasks, automating mundane
tasks, supporting scale and sustainability,
and focusing on learning.
Report – https://bit.ly/2A2krFQ

15. Teaching and training

16. Supporting discussion
Why did nobody reply to me? Paper – http://bit.ly/2OlmZHN
Initiating posts Lone posts
Connectors If, or, then,
example, e.g.
Also, and
Comparative Than, same More
Grammatical The, that, there,
here, does, did,
was, were, ’s, on,
by
Am, ’m, have, for,
about, with, to
Speech act Mean, explain,
tells, says, say,
told, called
Past tense /
passive
Used, tried, came joined
Shi-Min Chua

17. Removing barriers
Papers – oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/fi364.html
Francisco Iniesto
My health issues (fatigues,
concentration issues,
seizures limiting screen time)
mean I can't always do the
whole course as set out and
I'm usually weeks behind and
trying to catch up. Also any
that are just videos of
lectures put up with little extra
info (MOOC learner)

18. MOOC educators
The design, the video presentation, the editing as well as the facilitation,
and the extended roles outside FutureLearn are activities with which all
categories of participant were found to have been involved.
Video – http://bit.ly/2Ece1Im
Tina Papathoma
Although FL Educators are the
experts in their course subject,
at the same time, they are
novices in other areas of
expertise that MOOC teaching
demands.
Time was a key element that
limited MOOC educators
opportunities to transform
knowledge forms and integrate
them within the MOOC context.

19. The future
Supporting self-regulated learning in MOOCs
Removing barriers to access
Increasing emotional engagement
Teaching English via social network sites

20. slideshare.net/R3beccaF