Why online teacher trainers should know about cMOOCsVance StevensCo-coordinator since 2003 of TESOL Electronic Village OnlineEFL Instructor at HCT / CERT / KBZAC Al Ain, UAEGlobal Education Conference, November 17, 2015

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

No need to take notes

All my slides are online: http://slideshare.net/vances

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

What is Electronic Village Online?

Electronic Village Online(EVO) http://evosessions.pbworks.com

5 weeks each January and February since 2001 Organized by volunteer coordinators and

session moderators from countries all over the world

Sessions designed by teachers for other teachers

Offered for free to participants from around the globe as a service to the profession

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

EVO Moderator training in November each year

Helps ensure that sessions included in CfP in Dec meets standards expected in the profession

The system invites innovation and creativity in how sessions are mounted

Training designed to not simply train moderators in skills they may already have

but to model how such training might be conducted online

One such model is MOOC, in particular cMOOC

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

What’s a MOOC?

Basic MOOC history• Wiki view• Wikipedia• Starting with pre-history of MOOCs• This page, click here

http://nova.campusguides.com/c.php?g=112312&p=725994

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When did MOOCs begin?

A MOOC by definition a massive open online course The term MOOC was coined in 2008 by Dave

Cormier and / or Brian Alexander Both were involved in the seminal MOOC that year

Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, the first of many of what became known as cMOOC

Credit: Alan Levine https://www.flickr.com/photos/cogdog/5416836395

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Were there MOOCs before 2008?

Alison, 2007

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Feerick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Networked_learning#MOOC

http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2012/11/when-is-mooc-not-mooc-what-mooc-means.html

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Why MOOCs?Massive: ScalesOpen / online: abundance vs. scarcity

Stephen Downes 2012; posted in Alan Levine: http://cogdogblog.com/2012/09/21/just-ds106/

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Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age (Siemens, 2004)

http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/connectivism.htm

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Understanding how cMOOCs work is ineffable (must be experienced)

https://p2pu.org/en/courses/882/rhizomatic-learning-the-community-is-the-curriculum/

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Organization of a cMOOCCommunity as CurriculumAs a participant, you might be asked to • Enroll your blog with the MOOC• Tag relevant posts with the MOOC tag• use https://tagboard.com/ or a script to

aggregate ALL just tagged posts from ALL participants

• And display them in newsletter format• Participants can then interact with each

other by commenting on each other’s posts

http://grsshopper.downes.ca/about.htm

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Coping with cMOOCs (Cormier)

http://youtu.be/r8avYQ5ZqM0

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Flipped Learning in MOOCs As instances of online courses, both

xMOOCs and cMOOCs utilize what has become known as flipped learning,

an idea that many consider to have been first implemented on a wide scale in Khan Academy courses in 2004 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom).

However, this common feature of MOOCs belies other very significant differences.

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Flipped learning in MOOCs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_aiclass/all/

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

Enter xMOOCs Many people associate the term MOOC

with the xMOOC model initiated by Peter Norvik  and Sebastian Thrun in 2011, the latter of whom went on to start Udacity.

Coursera appeared soon after, followed by EdX,

whose name Siemens co-opted in making the distinction between cMOOCs (or connectivist MOOCs) and xMOOCs (Siemens, 2012).

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Thrun and Norvig’s xMOOC on AI

http://moocnewsandreviews.com/ultimate-guide-to-xmoocs-and-cmoocso/

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xMOOCs (Thrun went from Stanford to found Udacity)

https://www.udacity.com/courses#!/All https://www.edx.org/course-list

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Confusion over cMOOCs and xMOOCs

http://degreeoffreedom.org/xmooc-vs-cmooc/

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Siemens on cMOOC vs xMOOCSiemens  coined the term xMOOC in a 2012 post "xMOOC?" http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/In which he said:

"Our MOOC model emphasizes creation, creativity, autonomy, and social networked learning.

The Coursera model emphasizes a more traditional learning approach through video presentations and short quizzes and testing.

Put another way, cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication." 

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

Is EVO a MOOC? Some who have engaged in online training for

the past decade or more are considering whether what they have been doing might have fallen under the definition of MOOC all along.

EVO, now in its 15th year, could conceivably claim to be a precursor MOOC by virtue of its comprising a set of courses conducted entirely online Creating permanent artifacts on open

access and reaching thousands of participants

each year

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Maybe EVO is a MOOCIn guiding development of EVO sessions, it’s worth looking at what characterizes and distinguishes cMOOCs from xMOOCs. Some affordances of the former resonate with

what normally happens in EVO sessions; e.g. use of social media, participant driven content distributed communication no formal assessment

as specified in an article by Bates (2014) which is being used in EVO training this year. 

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In conclusion … or more correctly To further the discussionEVO is all about networking and CoP The sessions strongly build content not

only from a set syllabus in each course but in most cases from discussion and

creativity brought to each subject by participants

from diverse perspectives from all over the globe

Thus EVO can benefit from considering its activities to be informed by elements of the cMOOC framework

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

A short bibliography Bates, A. W. (2014), Comparing xMOOCs and cMOOCs: Philosophy and

Practice. Online learning and distance education resources. Available: http://www.tonybates.ca/2014/10/13/comparing-xmoocs-and-cmoocs-phil... (also available as Variations of MOOC Designs, Chapter 5.3 in Bates' open textbook,Teaching in a Digital Age, 2015).

Cormier, D. (2008). Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum. Innovate: Journal of Online Education 4, 5:np. Available: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1045&context=innovate.

Siemens, G. (2012). MOOCs are really a platform. Elearnspace. Available:http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platf....

Stevens, V. (2014). What we learn from MOOCs about Professional Development and Flipping Classrooms - GLoCALL Ahmedabad 2014. AdVancEducation. Available:http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2014/10/what-we-learn-from-moocs-about.html. Also,http://www.slideshare.net/vances/plenary-ahmedabad2014.

Stevens, V. (2013). From teacher networked learning to transformation in your classroom. AdVancEducation.Available: http://advanceducation.blogspot.ae/2013/09/from-teacher-networked-learning-to.html.

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

What else do you want to know?

• Almost 500 posts about MOOCs: http://www.downes.ca/mooc_posts.htm

• Downes, S. (2012). Connectivism and Connective Knowledge: Essays on meaning and learning networks. Stephen's Web: My eBooks. Available http://www.downes.ca/files/Connective_Knowledge-19May2012.pdf.

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

For more information from me

Take a side-tour: http://www.slideshare.net/vances/chaos-in-learning

Vance Stevens at Global Education Conference 2015

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Thank you

This is Episode 301 ofhttp://learning2gether.pbworks.com/Or http://tinyurl.com/learning2getherInfo and archives: http://learning2gether.net  Vance Stevens, vancestev@gmail.com