Last week I was lucky to be invited to speak on a panel at the TAFE NSW Virtual Learning Environments conference along with Loretta O'Donnell from UNSW and Mark Smithers from Seek Online.
It was good to be able to represent an organisation actually creating MOOCs with www.open2study.com and to be able to promote and describe the free online offerings and how the mix between a xMOOC and a cMOOC is envisaged and being implemented. (cMOOCs being connectivist in nature harnessing the power of networks and learning communities around a course, xMOOCs being a mass produced course model which is essentially a large scale repurposing of traditional content.) It was also useful to share the success of the 2 free offerings we have provided via open2study from TAFE NSW, Financial Planning and Sport and Recreation.
Not many of the audience had done subjects with open2study however there was good feedback from one of the teachers who had done Wrtiting for the Web and UX for the Web. In particular she found the badging highly engaging, pleasing given that as an online teacher she might be more immune to methods to engage, I would have thought a teacher would prefer to focus purely on content.
There was a lot of interest from the floor initially about where the financial return of MOOCs is for the organisation. This lead to lively discussion about using free MOOCs for promotion of paid courses, gathering analytics, the benefits to an organisation of making materials available free, and the opportunity for online educators and organisations to position themselves as experts in a particular field. This for me is one of the benefits to a vocational organisation - that there are areas of specialty that can through MOOC style delivery might expand reach nationally or internationally. The example I gave was a TAFE teacher who recently created a course around vocational training delivery - however his former specialty, aviation electronics, might have a more far reaching appeal for his organisation in a MOOC format.
There are advantages and disadvantages for VET (vocational education and training) with MOOC style delivery. The advantage is that VET is interested in repeatability of standard approaches - which we see in the National Vet Elearning Stragegy's Standards work and national learning object repository - there is no point reinventing the wheel if someone has done the same thing elsewhere and materials can be shared. MOOCs create repeatability in a new form - if someone is running a course online somewhere in Australia there is no point someone else running exactly the same course - notwithstanding staffing implications. The disadvantage is running assessment and collecting evidence of competence at such a scale. But as Mark Smithers pointed out VET is often way ahead of Higher Ed in developing new online methods. Limitation can often be a driver of innovation - provided it is not too extreme as in the case of the TAFE cutbacks in Victoria.
There is a myth that MOOCs are expensive to set up - the figure of $300,000 was mentioned per subject. This is fine if you want to attract 100,000 students; but MOOCs can be easy to set up and many have been run in Moodle at low cost. The advantage of setting up a low cost cMOOC is that the potential for using the community for social learning, peer assessment and contributions from students to the content of the course. For the teacher however there needs to be a huge investment of their time and effort in order to get the payoff for themselves and their organisation. This is the case regardless of whether they are running an xMOOC or a cMOOC or something in between. The organisation needs to provide some resourcing and time release for a successful product.
It was interesting to hear that TAFE NSW plans their own MOOCs (called TOOCs) and I will watch what they do with interest.
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