Credit: Photo by Giulia Forsythe under a
CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 License

I recently successfully finished my first massive open online course (MOOC). It was the 6-week Gamification course on the new Coursera platform, presented by Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. It wasn’t the first MOOC I’d ever started but it was different in its underlying approach than the others. This post contextualizes the Coursera MOOC platform prior to discussing whether it succeeds or not in a later post.

The Early MOOC

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK09) in 2009 was the first MOOC I think I participated in, although I may have dipped in and out of the inaugural one a year prior. I certainly remember more about Personal Learning Environments, Networks, and Knowledge (PLENK2010) run the next year. That MOOC, facilitated by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, and Rita Kop, and others they ran were organized similarly. The course had a website hosting a sign-up facility, a syllabus and general course information, links to the online presentation rooms, and usually forums. Students were encouraged to explore a given topic space, aggregating resources. They were aided by the facilitators who produced some appropriate content and either gave a presentation each week or invited someone else from the educational technology community to do so.

From these resources and influenced by content contributed by other course participants, students would produce their own content in the form of blogs, movies, mindmaps, etc. These would be shared with other participants and there was an ethos that encouraged remixing or repurposing content. Each day, a newsletter would be mailed out to participants, highlighting some of the recently produced artifacts. You could also search around the web for the #PLENK2010 hashtag or subscribe to an RSS feed of participant blog posts. It was many-to-many.

The Coursera MOOC

PLENK2010 was completely unlike the Coursera offering. The Gamification course had the following elements: a course site with the latest news, a syllabus, the course lectures, multiple choice quizzes, written homework assignments, and the forums. The course content consisted of 12 units, with each unit containing five or six 8-to–15-minute videos. A few videos were interviews with other people, but the majority were Kevin Werbach addressing key concepts.

It was a structure that encouraged passive consumption. That’s not to say students weren’t encouraged to work with the material. Some videos contained one or two simple multiple choice questions embedded within them and many contained “reflection exercises” where the watcher was asked to think about something, write down a response, and then share it later in the forums. The forums also provided space to arrange meetups and local study groups. Certainly the Twitter #gamification12 tag saw some good use. Some students did write blog posts and others contributed to a wiki or to preparing and sharing video annotations. However, for the majority of students, the only content production would have been forum posts, the written assignments, or peer feedback.

With this type of structure, very early on I found myself musing how Coursera was any different to the Open University, for whom I’ve taught online since 2001, or any other higher education institution with course content online. Coursera basically appeared to be an LMS or VLE. Sure, it operated on a large scale per course, even larger than that of the Open University, but still a VLE. Sui Fai John Mak is a regular contributor to the connectivist MOOCs I’ve previously joined and a collaborator on some peer-reviewed papers around MOOCs and a pedagogy of abundance. In a recent blog post, he described MOOCs in this style as “flipped classrooms”, but ones still based on the instructivist approach.

The “flipped” part, explained earlier in the post, is that the “classroom” is used for the interactive parts, while the content and some exercises are completed by the students at home. It’s still, however, basically the traditional approach to learning. It is the classic “sage on the stage” approach (King 1993)[2]King:1993 but one-to-very-many.

xMOOC versus cMOOC

On Twitter I was commenting on how we’d need a different term to differentiate between the (for me) “traditional” connectivist-based MOOC and the new MOOCs by Udacity, Coursera, and similar. Nobody embarrassed me by pointing out that it had been done while I’d been on an extended vacation earlier this year.

We now have “xMOOC” to describe the Coursera-type offerings and “cMOOC” for the connectivism-inspired approaches. George Siemens (2012)[3]Siemens:2012 succinctly defines the difference as “… cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication. ” or pithily as @MarkSmither’s other half put it: “in an xMOOC you watch videos, in a cMOOC you make videos.” So true!

Despite their pedagogical differences, the two approaches share some characteristics, not all of which can be seen as good. In a follow-up post, I’ll consider the practical issues of courses with tens of thousands of students as experienced as a participant in the Gamification xMOOC, contrasting them with some of the issues as I perceived them for participants in cMOOCs.

References

1. Mak:2012

   Mak, S.F.J. (2012) ‘In MOOCs, more is less, and less is more (part 2)’, Learner Weblog: Education and Learning weblog, blog entry posted September 12. Available at: http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/in-moocs-more-is-less-and-less-is-more-part–2 (Accessed October 19, 2012).

2. King:1993

   King, A. (1993) ‘From sage on the stage to guide on the side’. College Teaching, 41 (1), pp:30–35. Available from: http://www.jstor.org/pss/27558571.

3. Siemens:2012

   Siemens, G. (2012) ‘MOOCs are really a platform’, Elearnspace: Learning, Networks, Knowledge, Technology, Community, blog entry posted July 25. Available at: http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/ (Accessed October 19, 2012).

Image: Photograph composited from pieces of many other photographs: a visual affinity.

James Paul Gee introduced the idea of affinity groups in his seminal What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language, Learning, and Literacy (Gee, 2007). It is defined as the people associated with a given semiotic domain. That basically is a domain in which people use particular symbols or language to communicate and interact. We’re already well used to the concept, even if we don’t realize it. A given academic discipline, for example, will have its own vocabulary and, in that context, use language in a particular way, even if others use it differently in another context. It’s all about situated cognition and situated meaning. Games and their communities will have their own semiotics and constitute a semiotic domain. Members of an affinity group will have a way to recognize others who belong and to assess what counts as acceptable or recognizable within that semiotic domain.

The key problem he perceives is that we attempt to a label a group of people and then have issues about who is “in” or “out” of the group. This comes about in particular because:

• Community implies belonging, which may not always be the case, especially in classrooms and workspaces.
• Community brings the idea of people being members, related to belonging, but also to shared goals or a collective purpose that may not be in force.
• Community of practice has been applied to all manner of things, possibly “missing the trees for the forest.”

Starting the notion of spaces, rather than community, he argues, can give us an analytical lens with which to examine classrooms and the activities that occur within them without the baggage that community of practice brings with it. “In affinity spaces people ‘bond’ first and foremost to an endeavour or interest and secondarily, if at all, to each other.” (Gee, 2007 p.98)

Spaces (general) have the following features:

• Content, both design content and interactional content, i.e. how people play and how they organize their behaviours, beliefs, values and actions around the content. Design content is created by content generators.
• Organization of content and interactions. Content organization arises from the design of a game. Interactional organization comes from interactions on and with the space and the people in it.
• Portals, which are entrances into the space, e.g. a website to discuss a game, the game disc itself, wikis, etc. Some of these become content generators in their own right.

I believe guilds in World of Warcraft are examples of a community of practice in many cases, because they do exhibit shared goals, joint enterprise, and mutual engagement. Not all guilds will be possibly, but those are probably also the guilds that don’t manage to live that long. Ducheneaut et al (2007) found that in a 6-month period, out of 3000+ guilds, 54% had disappeared. One question Dave White (2007) posed in his GLS 3 talk was how long does it take to form or seed a community? That is a good question. One of the problems with adapting the community practices in WoW to higher education (online or otherwise) is that guilds do take some time to evolve, especially if they involve people who were previously unknown to each other. This is perhaps where Gee’s idea of affinity spaces comes into play. Affinity spaces, Gee says, have the following eleven characteristics:

• Common endeavour, not race, class, gender, or disability, is primary.
• Newbies and masters and everyone else share common space.
• Some portals are strong generators.
• Content organization is transformed by interactional organization.
• Encourages intensive and extensive knowledge.
• Encourages individual and distributed knowledge.
• Encourages dispersed knowledge.
• Uses and honours tacit knowledge.
• Many different forms and routes to participation.
• Lots of different routes to status.
• Leadership is porous and leaders are resources.

Reproduced from (Gee, 2007 p. 98-101).

A space can be more or less of an affinity space and can possess degrees of the characteristics. It is not a binary, prescriptive list. The theory then is that if we incorporate these ideas into our educational environments, we can help forge more cohesiveness, autonomy, and, in the end learning. Many of these characteristics are also shared by communities of practice and foster digital literacies. Those are the characteristics of dispersed and distributed knowledge, which may be generated by the students themselves, who become portals in their own right. Autonomy is forged by individual knowledge and content organization being transformed by interactional organization—which bears a striking resemblance to Downes and Siemens’s ideas about connectivism (c.f. Downes, 2007; Siemens, 2008). The last two can also be artefacts of digital literacies or encouraged by a connectivist paradigm: the tools used allow many types of participation. Some people may participate in wikis or make videos, while others may only post on forums. Others may take on roles within the game. My partner “Basil”, for example, in Eve Online does not have a lot of time to play with his guild because of a time zone difference. He is, however, extremely active in their forums and became a valued member because of that. He is participating in the Eve affinity space but also belongs to a community of practice within Eve.

References:

Downes, S. (2007) ‘What Connectivism Is’, Half an Hour, blog entry posted February 3, 2007. Available from: http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2007/02/what-connectivism-is.html (Accessed July 25, 2011).

Ducheneaut, N. et al. (2007) ‘The Life And Death of Online Gaming Communities: A Look at Guilds in World of Warcraft’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (SIGCHI 2007), San Jose, CA, United States, April 28 – May 3, ACM. pp:839-848. Also available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1240624.1240750.

Gee, J.P. (2007a) What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. 2nd edition. New York, NY, United States, Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J.P. (2007b) ‘Affinity Spaces: From Age of Mythology to Today’s Schools’, in Good Video Games + Good Learning: Collected Essays on Video Games, Learning, and Literacy, New York, NY, United States, Peter Lang. pp. 87-103.

Siemens, G. (2008) ‘What is the Unique Idea in Connectivism?’, Connectivism, blog entry posted August 6, 2008. Available from: http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=116 (Accessed July 25, 2011).

White, D. (2007) ‘Cultural Capital and Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying’, presented at Games Learning and Society 3.0, Madison, WI, United States, July 12-13. Also available from: http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2007/07/30/cultural-capital-and-community-development-in-the-pursuit-of-dragon-slaying/ (Accessed July 26, 2011).

In the last five years, the twin concepts of the personal learning environment (PLE) and personal learning network (PLN) have been offered as alternatives to more traditional environments such as the learning management system (LMS) and institutionally-based courses.

During that time, a substantial body of research has been produced by thinkers, technologists and practitioners in the field. Dozens of studies, reviews, conference presentations, concept papers and diagrams are now available.

The purpose of this course will be to clarify and substantiate, from the context of this new research, the concepts of personal learning environments and networks. Course facilitators and participants will analyze the research literature and evaluate it against their own experience with the intent of developing a comprehensive understanding of personal learning environments and networks.
Downes, Siemens, and Cormier (2010)

The course just kicked off this week and the first topic involves social networks, personal learning networks, and personal learning environments.  While I was reading through some of the postings on PLEs versus PLNs, it suddenly occurred to me that a massively online open course, especially one with this kind of structure, is not too dissimilar to the learning that occurs in MMORPGs.  In fact, I’d argue that good game players need to construct their own personal learning networks in order to understand the game and improve their playing. They’re both about social construction of knowledge.

I think a great idea for a paper is contrasting the formal and informal learning networks people build in an MOOC like PLENK2010 and in  MMORPGs.  It could even be fleshed out with some interviews with 4 or 5 players about how/what they use during the course of game playing.  I envision it should be possible to construct some GPLN (game player learning network) diagrams similar to the PLN diagrams that Scott Leslie collected.  Here, for example, is Martin Weller’s PLN:

I could make a similar diagram for myself, but with a specific game-playing focus.  I’m sure I could easily entice some other, more hard-core players, to make similar diagrams, if not as actual graphics at least as a list.  I really think there is something here.  The key point though is, even if there is, what does it mean if there is a similarity?  That I don’t know.  Any ideas?

Downes, S., Siemens, G. & Cormier, D. (2010) Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge ~ PLENK 2010, [online] web site. Available from: http://connect.downes.ca/