Learner Participation and Engagement in Open Online Courses: Insights from the Peer 2 Peer University

         Learner Participation and Engagement in Open Online Courses:
Insights from the Peer 2 Peer University

June Ahn
Assistant Professor
College of Information Studies and College of Education
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20740 USA
juneahn@umd.edu

Brian S. Butler
Associate Professor
College of Information Studies and Robert H. Smith School of Business
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20740 USA
bsbutler@umd.edu

Alisha Alam
Graduate Research Assistant
College of Information Studies
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20740 USA
alisha@umd.edu

Sarah A. Webster
Graduate Research Assistant
College of Information Studies
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20740 USA
websters@umd.edu

Abstract

Recent developments in massive open online courses (MOOCs) have brought renewed attention to online learning, but most of the attention has been centered on courses offered through platforms such as Coursera and edX. This paper focuses on the importance of examining alternative, large-scale learning initiatives that promote more participatory modes of education production and delivery. It presents a comprehensive description of the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), a social computing platform that promotes peer-created, peer-led, online learning environments. Using log data from the P2PU platform, the ecosystem of this learner-generated education platform is described. The descriptive analysis highlights P2PU's growth in terms of the participatory learning environments that have been created – such as online study groups, courses, and challenges – and also describes the participation patterns of P2PU members. This paper provides one of the first empirical descriptions of an emerging open learning platform and illuminates how log data from the platform, particularly in relation to open courses, open badges, and learning tasks embedded in courses, can be used to track development of courses and engagement in learning activities across P2PU. The analyses reported here are aimed at helping researchers understand the P2PU ecosystem and identify potential areas for future study as P2PU works to open its data for public analysis.

Keywords: massive open online course (MOOC), open education, peer-to-peer learning, participatory learning, crowdsourced education

Introduction

While recent platforms for massive open online courses (MOOCs) such as Coursera and edX have garnered substantial public attention, MOOCs were originally conceived of as participatory environments where groups of learners (from small to massive) collaborate to aggregate self-created learning experiences (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010). In this model of peer-based, open learning, a course might organize topics and guide the schedule. However, individual learners coordinate the learning activities by contributing blog posts, links to resources, and other media. This model brings to the foreground a bottom-up, crowd-generated approach to delivering online education versus the top-down approach implemented in popular platforms. Yet in spite of their differences, learner participation and engagement is a concern in both types of MOOCs (Waters, 2012).

At a basic level, any learning platform requires participant engagement to achieve its goals. Individuals must participate in the provided activities in order to have the learning experiences that are the focus of the platform. Beyond this basic form of participation, crowd-generated learning platforms require learners to engage in many other activities such as creating courses and learning materials, joining online courses, contributing comments and discussion, and persisting in the group's learning activities. Creating a participatory MOOC environment requires both more coordinated work (Butler & Ahn, 2013) and more types of participation than top-down MOOCs that rely primarily on individual learner engagement (Ahn, Weng, & Butler, 2013; Kafai & Peppler, 2011). However, in spite of its importance, there has been little empirical work done on conceptualizing and measuring participation in large scale, open learning platforms.

In the following study, the patterns of participation and engagement present in a prominent participatory, open online learning community, the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), are examined. An outline is first provided of how P2PU is an example of a peer-generated open online course platform that speaks to the original notion of participatory MOOCs. Then, statistics derived from a comprehensive dataset about P2PU courses and participant activity are presented, with the aim of exploring the question of how learners have participated and engaged with open online courses in P2PU.

The data in this study describe the course ecology that exists on the P2PU platform using metrics such as the number of member-created courses, types of courses, patterns of course enrollment, and active contributions to these peer-to-peer courses over time. A descriptive analysis of the diverse learning environments that have arisen in this participatory, open education platform is also offered.

This paper makes several contributions to research on open online learning communities. Recent developments in top-down MOOCs (Coursera, edX, etc.) have brought renewed energy and attention to online learning. It highlights the importance of examining alternative, and equally exciting, open learning initiatives such as P2PU. This paper provides the first empirical descriptions of an emerging open learning platform, illuminating how log data from P2PU, particularly in relation to open courses, open badges, and learning tasks embedded in courses, can be used to track the development of courses and engagement in learning activities across P2PU. Different flavors of online education are developing at a rapid pace, bringing to the fore numerous research questions and concerns. The descriptions presented in this paper are aimed to help researchers understand the P2PU ecosystem and identify potential areas for future study as P2PU works to open its data for public analysis.

Related Work

Understanding the different definitions of the term MOOC is vital to develop a nuanced understanding of how educational experiences are developed and delivered in various online platforms. Recent, high profile MOOC examples such as Coursera, edX, and Udacity represent what some term "xMOOCs," with their institutional, top-down, content-delivery driven models (Siemens, 2012). Courses in these platforms are typically designed as a weekly syllabus of video lectures followed by quizzes or other assignments that evaluate whether students understood the content. Discussion boards are also often provided for students to ask questions and seek clarification on information related to the course. These courses mirror the structure of what was seen in most online education platforms. The major innovations have been the ability of these platforms to curate and freely deliver content from elite universities and garner "massive" enrollments of thousands and tens of thousands of learners.

In contrast to this traditional model of teaching and learning is what educators have referred to as connectivist MOOCs or "cMOOCs" (McAuley et al., 2010; Siemens, 2012). This original form of MOOC was viewed as an experiment that leveraged the distributed, networked information available on the Internet with the learners themselves generating most of the learning activities. Learners might write their own reflections about what they are learning on blogs and other social media platforms, share these back with their peers, create social networks with others in the MOOC, share information, and aggregate their ideas to create an emergent learning experience.

This form of collective learning differs from the xMOOC model in several significant ways (Kafai & Peppler, 2011). First, the modes of production differ dramatically. In xMOOCs, elite institutions such as Stanford University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and partner universities develop courses. In cMOOCs, the underlying philosophy is that any individual should be empowered to design a learning experience. Second, course implementation and the role of learners are conceptualized very differently. In an xMOOC, learner responsibilities focus on consuming the course content and completing evaluations to assess understanding of that content. In a cMOOC, learners may utilize the course-provided content, but as one resource among many that they may access through their own online searching and research. Learners take on the dual role of learners and teachers, as they help their peers through the learning process they are also undertaking. In a cMOOC, the content of the course is user-generated and emergent, arising from the persistent contributions of the learners themselves. Leadership is distributed and the learning experience is severely limited if there are only a few students generating ideas and information.

Connectivist or collectivist MOOC environments build on broader trends in computing and technology-mediated social interaction. These versions of MOOCs leverage the capabilities of social computing, where networked media and technology enable individuals to easily share information, communicate with others, and drive online content-creation (Parameswaran & Whinston, 2007). Thus, instead of treating learning as information transfer from instructor to student, learning is conceptualized as arising from social interaction and information sharing via networked tools. A collectivist philosophy of online education also represents a particular instantiation of crowdsourcing. The term crowdsourcing describes the use of technology to outsource a task typically done by a particular agent or person by distributing the task to a large group of people to do collectively (Howe, 2006). In the MOOC context, one could observe the process of course creation as a crowdsourcing example. In xMOOC platforms, course creation is crowdsourced, in a sense, to individual universities and their instructors, but aggregated in a central platform. Yet at a micro-level, courses are still designed and created by a single source, the instructor. In a cMOOC context, the course content and design are further crowdsourced to the learners themselves. Rather than one source of information and content, learners form online social networks in which they share and aggregate content across multiple channels. Through the use of social computing platforms, education could potentially be a crowdsourced endeavor, where learners create, manage, and collectively implement large-scale, online courses.

The Peer 2 Peer University

P2PU is non-profit organization and online platform that began in 2009. The online community promotes experimentation in open learning and peer-led education. The platform allows any member to design and create an educational course, which can then be taken by any other member in the online community. In P2PU, learning environments come in a variety of formats (with courses being only one instantiation). The general term used in P2PU is learning "project," and this term will be used in the present paper to speak generally to different P2PU learning situations. More specific terms refer to particular learning environments. In P2PU, members can create study groups to bring together learners around topics of interest for a set period of time. Members can also create more formal courses that are structurally similar to study groups. The most recent iteration of P2PU adds challenges, which are asynchronous courses that remain persistent and act as guides for learners through an educational experience (rather than being time-bound). Learners in P2PU can join, complete, and leave challenges at any moment. P2PU has also introduced new forms of collective assessment through open badges. Learners can earn badges associated with different learning tasks and courses, which tie into the Mozilla Open Badges framework (The Mozilla Foundation & P2PU, 2012). Study groups, courses, challenges, and badges are all important constructs that P2PU provides to organize peer-generated learning experiences, and each will be considered in the analysis presented below.

In many ways, P2PU is a social computing platform that crowdsources the creation and implementation of informal online education. Instead of formal teachers or established institutions acting as the sole developers of online courses, any stakeholder can create a course in P2PU. In addition, the mission and ethos of the P2PU community encourages a social process of learning. Courses are not designed merely as content delivery mechanisms, but as spaces that ask members to engage in active learning projects, share their progress and resources, start and participate in discussions, and collaborate to gain knowledge of a topic area. Similarly, P2PU's experiments with open badges are a way to observe how social assessments of learning can be recognized and credited in open, informal learning environments. As a crowdsourced education platform, the success of the community is critically dependent on each member's active and persistent participation.

In this study, the authors sought to better understand the notions of learner participation and engagement in open online courses, and explore how researchers could observe these activities using log and trace data from P2PU. The goal was to take the raw data provided by P2PU, and use descriptive analytics to understand the broader ecosystem of the P2PU community. The main research question guiding this study was:

How have learners participated and engaged with open online learning in P2PU?

In a participatory, open education setting like P2PU, the learning environments themselves are not givens. There is a substantial amount of member effort needed to create the basic learning contexts (e.g., courses and challenges) and assessments (e.g., badges) required for the platform to function. As Butler and Ahn (2013) observe, a great amount of cooperative work and coordination is needed to create materials, mobilize peers, and collaborate in productive ways, before learning can even occur. Thus, the descriptive analysis of the P2PU log data began with an exploration of exploring questions such as:

How many courses and challenges comprise the P2PU community?What patterns of participation can be observed in these learning contexts?What are the characteristics of learning environments within P2PU?How can learners' participation and engagement in these contexts be measured?These descriptive analyses of the P2PU community can then inform future researchers seeking to explore complex relationships between learning context characteristics and learner participation, and engagement.

Method

The study reported here was part of an ongoing partnership with P2PU, in which the main goals are to: (1) create policies and processes to publicly share datasets of the P2PU platform; and (2) conduct analyses of this widely used open education platform to shed light on the challenges of supporting large-scale, participatory, online learning. The project includes substantial data work to transform raw P2PU log data into usable variables and datasets for researchers in education and other related fields. In addition, the research team is exploring various learning analytics techniques for illuminating the learning processes that occur in this online community (Bienkowski, Feng, & Means, 2012).

In October 2012, P2PU provided the research team with a raw dataset containing a complete record of all elements of the platform (courses, challenges, users, learning activities, etc.). This dataset covered the entire history of P2PU from its beginning in late 2009 to October 2012. The data was a copy of the back-end mySQL database that is the operational foundation for P2PU.org and consisted of 82 tables. In an initial phase of data exploration, the research team developed a high-level mapping of the tables that corresponded to the primary components of the P2PU platform and their relationships to one another (Figure 1). This study utilized log data from those tables that described P2PU Schools, Projects (e.g., the different types of learning contexts), Badges, Users, and user Content contributions.

Figure 1. High-level description of the P2PU relational database structure

Although the database theoretically provided a rich, fine-grained record of P2PU schools, projects, users, their activity, and badges, the raw log data was structured in terms of operational transactions and entity status records which did not readily correspond to the constructs most likely to be of interest to researchers and analysts. To overcome this mismatch the research team first conducted a phase of data exploration and descriptive analytics to construct a holistic understanding of various levels of the P2PU community. Then on this basis, a project-level dataset was created that characterized the nature, history, and activity associated with every project (e.g., study group, course, challenge) ever created on the P2PU platform. This analysis dataset included a number of variables for each project, which are described in turn below.

Project name: Name of the P2PU project. Language: What language the project uses (e.g., English, Spanish). Project category: What type of project is it (study group, course, or challenge)? Under development: A binary flag that designates whether a given project is under development or "live" and available to the public. Deleted: A binary flag designating whether a project has been deleted. Archived: A binary flag designating whether a project is no longer publicly available and has been archived. Project pages: A count of how many website pages have been created for a given project. Organizer count: P2PU project may have one or more creators or leaders (known as organizers). This variable indicates how many unique organizers are associated with a project. Participant count: P2PU Members can join study groups and courses as active "participants." This variable is a count of how many members have joined and self-designated as participants. Follower count: Members can also join study groups and courses as "followers," indicating that they will not actively participate but are interested in receiving notices about activity within the course. This variable is a count of how many members have joined and self-designated as followers. Total number of tasks: Each challenge consists of a series of tasks to be completed by learners. As they complete them, members record their progress by checking off each task. This variable indicates how many tasks are associated with each challenge. Adopter count: In challenges, members can join as active participants by working on tasks in order to complete the challenge. This variable indicates how many members begun working on the tasks associated with a challenge. Completers: In challenges, members can check off tasks as they work to achieve the challenge. When all the tasks are marked as completed, the challenge is said to have been completed. This variable is a count of how many members have completed a challenge. Average tasks completed: While some individuals complete all the tasks associated with a challenge, many do not. This variable captures the average number of tasks completed by the adopters of each challenge, providing a metric of the overall progress of the members participating in it. Total number of badges: Some challenges and courses are associated with badges that members can earn if they complete certain tasks. This variable is a count of how many badges were associated with a given project. Average badges earned: As with tasks, individuals can vary with respect to how far they have progressed with respect to the badges associated with a project. This variable captures the average number of badges completed (from those associated with the project) among the participating members.These variables were constructed based on an examination of the P2PU interface, consultation with P2PU developers, and detailed analysis of the P2PU platform code, which is available through an open source license. The constructed measures were also validated with SQL queries to multiple combinations of data tables of P2PU's backend database.

Findings

The P2PU Ecosystem

To explore how learners have participated and engaged with open online learning in P2PU several platform-level metrics that provided a glimpse into P2PU's history, its ecosystem of learning projects, and members in the community were examined. The primary component of the P2PU learning ecosystem is the project. Projects are bounded collections of dynamic and static content, organizers, participants, and infrastructure. There were 2,034 project records in the P2PU database that are broken down into three different learning environment types: 1,135 study groups, 506 courses, and 393 challenges.

Study groups bring together groups of informal learners together around educational tasks and discussions. Courses are similar in structure to study groups, but represent more formal learning projects that are open to anyone in P2PU. Courses organize around tasks that learners complete (and are typically structured as weekly tasks), in addition to threaded discussion pages where learners can participate in dialogue and share thoughts. In the recent iteration of P2PU, another learning environment called challenges was introduced. Challenges utilize a similar structure as courses but are asynchronous and persistent (whereas courses ran for a set period of time and learners dispersed). A challenge is a series of tasks and discussion spaces, where a learner can enter and exit at any point. Badges can also be associated with these challenges, which learners earn by completing various tasks. In approximately two years, P2PU has supported the creation of just over 2,000 distinct learning environments that combine a set of common elements to provide rich learning experiences for participants.

While there are numerous projects in P2PU, they vary significantly with respect to their level of development. The majority of the over 2,000 projects in P2PU were tagged as "under development," which means that members experimented with creating these learning environments, but never implemented them live in the community. Most projects appear to have started development but were never finished and released live, and others were deleted from the site over time. Of the total, there were 368 projects (18.09%) that went live and were not deleted from the P2PU platform. Of these projects 159 were challenges, 132 were study groups, and 77 were courses. About 85% of these projects were in English and 12% in Spanish (with less than 3% in other languages).

At the same time, it was also observed that in P2PU's nascent history, there has been a general trend of 10 to 25 new learning projects being developed and publicly released each month, with a sharp rise in July 2012 due to a special initiative that month (see Figure 2 below). Together, these statistics suggest that as a platform P2PU is able to successfully encourage individuals to experiment with creating a diverse array of participatory learning environments, but that a relatively small percentage of those projects are ever implemented as operational. Future research should consider the issues related to the development of learning projects in P2PU, strategies for fostering more complete learning project development over time, and analysis of whether this ratio of experimentation to "published" projects is optimal. In addition, there are rich opportunities to understand the barriers that individuals may face in the creation of projects within such a participatory platform. Factors such as a lack of understanding of the P2PU platform, prior knowledge in topic areas, motivation, or lack of community involvement may influence the systematic production and availability of learning projects over time.

Figure 2. Projects created by month ("live" courses only)

Along with this steady development of peer-created learning environments, there were 41,281 registered members in P2PU at the time of writing of this paper. Such membership represents a truly massive group of potential learners, and positions P2PU as an example of a large-scale participatory learning environment. P2PU does not describe itself as a cMOOC environment, but rather a platform to promote open, informal learning. However, taking a broad view of the entire platform, it is an online community of over 40,000 potential learners who can share and create their own participatory learning environments and experiences. This large pool of potential learners is notable as an experiment in participatory, peer-led learning; nonetheless, participation and engagement issues remain, just as in any other online community. Data in the P2PU database provides time-stamped fields for when a member created their P2PU account and the last date they were active in the community (when they logged on). Using these fields, it is possible to create various overall participation metrics, such as how many P2PU members ever returned to the site after first creating their account. It was found that 6,483 members returned to P2PU at least once after account creation (approximately 16% of all registered members). This implies that that the majority of members (approximately 85%) created accounts and never again engaged with the community. While this pattern of overall engagement (or relatively lack thereof) is a potential problem for P2PU, it is consistent with participation patterns observed in other online environments (Cummings, Butler, & Kraut, 2002). Nevertheless, having over 6,000 active members in this community still represents a substantial pool of learners and contributors in this participatory learning community. Furthermore, as P2PU has continued to establish itself as an online community, one can also observe that they have consistently attracted 300-400 new members per month (who return to the site) over the 2012 year (see Figure 3). Overall, these descriptive measures of P2PU's growth and history show an online community that is in an early stage of development, but steadily growing both in terms of individual users and different types of participatory learning environments.

Figure 3. Member accounts created by month (for 6,483 members who have returned at least once to P2PU)

To explore the relationship between these two interdependent elements of the P2PU ecology, metrics that describe how members participated and engaged within the context of study groups, courses, and challenges were examined. Members in P2PU can relate to projects in various ways. They can organize and create projects, or they can join in on projects as participants or followers. Of the 6,483 members of P2PU who logged in at least once more after creating an account, 4,730 (73%) have signed up to be an organizer, participant, or follower of at least one learning project. This suggests that of P2PU members who do return to the site, a substantial number attempt to become active members in projects by organizing a project or signing up to be a participant.

There was also significant variation in the number of members participating in different learning environments both within and across the different types (see Table 1). For example, study groups and courses in P2PU typically had 1-2 organizers who created the learning group and initiated activities. The majority of these learning groups were small. The median number of participants in study groups was three members and the median in courses was five members. However, some study groups and courses grew into quite large learning environments. Study groups reached up to 370 participants and 1,167 followers (individuals who followed along but did not actively participate). The largest courses grew to 173 members and 319 followers.

Table 1. Number of members who participated in P2PU study groups, courses, and challenges (live projects only)

Membership in P2PU challenges is organized a little differently. Learners choose to adopt the challenge and the platform also keeps track of who has completed a given learning challenge (completers). Again, a majority of challenges are small, with the median number of adopters being two members – although the distribution is skewed with some challenges successfully having up to 158 (current) adopters and 694 completers. These descriptive statistics highlight the wide diversity of participatory learning environments that arise in P2PU. Many study groups, courses, and challenges attract only a few like-minded individuals. However, some projects attract hundreds of learners to create larger-scale learning environments. Again, while the skewed distribution of participation potentially presents a challenge for P2PU and other open learning environments, it is consistent with the distribution of group and forum sizes that has been observed in other online contexts (Butler, 2001; Butler & Wang, 2012; Jones, Ravid, & Rafaeli, 2004). Future research that explores the relationships between support for development of focused learning environments, characteristics of the created learning environments, and the resulting patterns of participation would make substantial contributions to understanding how open learning communities such as P2PU can function more effectively.

Tasks and Badges: Opportune Measures of Engagement

As the P2PU platform has developed, support for different types of learning environments have been added. Initially, study groups (time-bounded, unstructured group interaction spaces) were supported, then courses (time-bounded, guided exploration of topics, with associated group interaction). Most recently challenges were introduced as ways to organize learning. Challenges are organized as an informal syllabus, consisting of a checklist of tasks. P2PU members join challenges and when they complete various learning tasks, they check off these tasks as completed. One unique affordance of this feature is that P2PU logs a record of challenges, tasks, adopters, and when these adopters checked off tasks as complete. Using these logs, measures of the persistence and engagement of participants in P2PU challenges as of October 2012 could be calculated.

The detailed logging of tasks provides some nuanced ways to conceptualize and observe persistence and engagement. For example, challenges in P2PU had an average of 4.67 learning tasks that members were asked to complete (Table 2). On average, members reported completing roughly half of the available tasks (2.24 average number of tasks completed per adopter). Interesting future research streams emerge from this descriptive data. For example, using the P2PU data it is possible to examine longitudinal trends of when P2PU members complete tasks and how other variables influence this task completion. In addition, future research might examine how characteristics of challenges, tasks, and P2PU members and their social networks relate to the completion of tasks over time.

Table 2. Tasks and badges associated with challenges in P2PU

Average number of tasks completed per adopterAverage number of badges earned per member

Note. N = 159 active challenges in P2PU.

In addition to tasks, P2PU had recently begun piloting an open badge system based on the Mozilla Open Badge Framework (The Mozilla Foundation & P2PU, 2012). The idea behind open badges is to provide publicly visible credentials for informal learning, and there is a rich area of future research to examine the varied social, cultural, and educational functions of online badges and informal credentialing (Abramovich, Schunn, & Higashi, 2013; Antin & Churchill, 2011). As with study groups, courses, and challenges, members of P2PU can create badges that other members can earn by completing different learning tasks and challenges. Badges are also logged in the P2PU system and provide a way to measure and understand learner achievements and their engagement with learning over time.

As of October 2012, the implementation of badges was in an early stage. As a result, many challenges did not have associated badges (i.e., challenges had an average of less than one badge associated with them). Some challenges had up to eight associated badges with some activity in members earning badges (Table 2). In future research, some interesting avenues could include examining learners' trajectories of badge earning and the different social dynamics at play in P2PU in relation to badge earning (e.g., to better understand who creates and earns badges, as well as what the predictors badge earning are).

Conclusion

One lesson from the recent rise of MOOCs (Pappano, 2012) is that new forms of online education will most likely endure, evolve, and become a vital part of how education is delivered in the future. Much of the initial excitement and attention to MOOCs have risen from a particular version of online learning, the xMOOC. This paper has highlighted how alternative, participatory forms of education production and delivery can develop within and be supported by social platforms such as P2PU. In such participatory, collective cMOOC contexts, participation and engagement take on varied forms. Courses must be developed, assessments created, fellow learners recruited, and learning environments sustained over time through engagement and participation. These different functions bring about new challenges to sustaining robust, large-scale, participatory learning environments. The challenges illuminate potentially high-impact research areas that could make a substantial contribution to improving and evolving large-scale, online learning that are alternatives to the high-profile examples that are popular today (Coursera, etc.).

Through the descriptive analysis of P2PU presented in this paper, some of these challenges have been highlighted and potential research directions for future work illuminated. P2PU is clearly an early-stage, but growing, online community. From the log data, it is evident that steady streams of members are joining the community over time, and that these members are actively experimenting with creating their own learning environments online. However, a substantial number of learning projects on P2PU are never released live and implemented. Interesting future questions remain about the experiences of learners who take on the role of course creators, including the following:

What are their motivations?What challenges do they face in creating participatory learning environments?What skills are needed to create effective courses, such as instructional design, and more importantly, how can the learning of these skills be "scaled out" to everyday individuals to foster more effective crowdsourced course development?What factors are related to courses actually being implemented in P2PU?Research in this stream would shed light on issues such as new forms of organization, instructional design, and production of education in a participatory, open, social computing context.

The analysis also highlights the wide variability present in the online learning environments that are present in P2PU. In a participatory setting such as P2PU, the majority of learning projects serve small groups of informal learners who come together around specific topics. These learning arrangements represent the long-tail of the ecosystem of learning contexts in P2PU with many courses that serve a few individuals around niche interests (Brown & Adler, 2008). A small number of P2PU projects successfully garnered the participation of hundreds and thousands of interested learners, and could be viewed as a form of cMOOC. Individual P2PU projects that garner thousands of students introduce new issues of educational practice at scale. However, the aggregation of hundreds and thousands of smaller learning arrangements in a platform such as P2PU also combines to create an alternative, and uniquely large-scale, ecology of education opportunities. Future questions remain concerning how to foster robust learning communities from this ecological perspective (Butler & Ahn, 2013). How many courses and members are needed to foster participation and learning activities? What factors within courses or learning projects are related to fostering engagement over time (e.g., Ahn, Weng, & Butler, 2013)? How can platforms such as P2PU foster the development of participatory learning behaviors such as social network formation, knowledge sharing, and active learning opportunities?

Finally, the P2PU platform also affords opportunities to examine concepts such as participation and engagement through new artifacts such as online learning tasks and open badges. It has been demonstrated here how log data of learning tasks in P2PU can show the variability of learning activity conducted by members. Future work is possible to examine longitudinal patterns of the learning tasks P2PU members undertake, which may provide indicators of sustained participation and engagement. In addition, research that can examine the relationship between factors such as course design, social interaction, and networks with the completion of learning tasks over time can make a substantial contribution to fundamental questions around supporting online learners to persist and not drop out of courses over time. P2PU's early piloting of open badges, and their logging of badge creation and earning behaviors, can also serve as an exciting context to explore the social, cultural, and educational functions of badges in online learning. These research areas promise to rise in importance as badges, and other artifacts of informal educational credentialing, become a major element of online learning in the future.

Overall, P2PU provides a rich environment for addressing many fundamental questions about the development, operation, and use of large scale, open, online learning platforms. While this work is still in its early stages, it provides an initial look at the way that focused learning environments, such as P2PU study groups, courses, and challenges, are developed (or not), are adopted (or not), and are engaged by learners (or not). Realizing the potential of MOOCs and other forms of large scale, technology-enabled learning environments will depend not only on understanding how to provide appropriate experiences for individual learners, but also on our ability to design platforms that provide the affordances necessary to support development of diverse populations of focused learning environments.

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Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation?

         Massiveness + Openness = New Literacies of Participation?

Bonnie Stewart
Sessional Lecturer and Doctoral Candidate
Faculty of Education
University of Prince Edward Island
Charlottetown, PE C1A 4P3 CANADA
bstewart@upei.ca

Abstract

As the narratives that guide higher education fracture and realign, the topic of massive open online courses (MOOCs) makes visible the fault lines emerging in the field of contemporary academia. MOOCs challenge universities' conventional societal role as purveyors of knowledge and credentials: they are heralded by some as revolution, and derided by others as mere privatization. This position paper skirts that binary debate, with the author instead arguing that MOOCs may in the end be something else entirely: a Trojan horse for an ethos of participation and distributed expertise. While recognizing that most MOOCs at this juncture do not share those alignments, the author explores the possibility that digital, participatory literacies could be an unintended consequence of the combination of massiveness and openness. She draws on 2010 research into the early connectivist MOOC model as a means of teaching digital literacies. Focusing on MOOCs from a social communications and learning-focused perspective rather than an instrumental or technologically centered approach, the author suggests that it is the ways in which MOOCs open up questions of goal, purpose, and teacher/student roles that make their massive scale so powerful, and proposes that MOOCs can help acculturate learners to a form of new literacy development for the digital age.

Keywords: massive open online course (MOOC), scale, open education, new literacies, participatory culture

Introduction: Beyond Divisions of Definition

Over the past year and a half, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have exploded into the media limelight. Originally an experimental phenomenon integrating "the connectivity of social networking, the facilitation of an acknowledged expert in a field of study, and a collection of freely accessible online resources" (McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010, p. 4), the MOOC has morphed into a juggernaut often acclaimed as a revolution in higher education (Pappano, 2012).

As MOOC hype has grown, however, the term has become a buzzword (Stewart, 2012a) and its meanings vague and contested. Not only are a wide variety of business and learning models represented in the many configurations of MOOC offerings currently available, responses to these courses and predictions regarding their implications for higher education are even more diverse.

This variety of responses to MOOCs is indicative of the fault lines becoming increasingly visible in the terrain of contemporary higher education. The term MOOC gets conflated with online education, with globalization, and with networked learning – to the point where public conversation about the topic becomes what Jackson (2013) calls "that most dangerous topic of discussion: a subject about which everybody needs to have an opinion" (para. 2). While Friedman (2013) hails the revolution in an article in The New York Times, others express concern over the unbundling of higher education services (Lima, 2012) and the transmission pedagogies that dominate many of the more prominent offerings (Bustillos, 2013). Some voices position MOOCs as synonymous with the privatization of higher education (Bady, 2013), while others – looking at very different course models – claim that they do not so much change the game of higher education as they are "playing a different game entirely" (Downes, 2012, para. 4).

This position paper takes up MOOCs neither as the future nor the death of academe. In it, the term will not be defined by the limitations of particular models of MOOC. Instead, the paper will extend the findings of a 2010 research project on MOOCs to consider the possibilities of the phenomenon, in all its forms, for the sociocultural growth and spread of digital literacies. Rather than argue for or against a single perspective on MOOCs, my premise is that it may be productive to consider their potential as large, immersive – and largely unintentional – environments for acculturating people to new digital literacies.

New literacies are not merely the doing of the same old things with new technologies. In a world in which mobile, digital technologies permeate daily life on a seemingly ever-increasing basis, educators may mistake the usage of technologies within learning environments for digital literacies practice. New digital literacies, however, have an ethos component as well as a technological one: "new literacies are more 'participatory,' 'collaborative,' and 'distributed'" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 9). The new literacies ethos "celebrates inclusion (everyone in), mass participation, distributed expertise, valid and rewardable roles for all who pitch in" (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007, p. 18).

Few MOOCs, at this juncture, overtly incorporate or foster this ethos. Yet, where massiveness intersects with openness, giving people the opportunity to interact with each other in networked environments, an environment for this new ethos may be inadvertently created. This paper argues that networked learning opportunities at the scale MOOCs are beginning to reach have the potential to expose large numbers of people to participatory literacies and learning perspectives, even if and where facilitation and testing are highly instrumental in approach.

Thus, even if many models of MOOC reflect attempts by elite gatekeeping institutions and corporate interests to maintain control, market dominance, and the right to determine what counts as knowledge (Stewart, 2012b), MOOCs may nonetheless serve as a Trojan horse for the sociocultural development of participatory perspectives and literacies.

Networked engagement is a key to this potential. According to Siemens and Weller (2011), networks are "defined by attributes of autonomy, reduced resistance to information flow, ease of connectivity, organic growth, rapid iteration and improvement of ideas and concepts, as well as ease of scalability" (p. 166). Current higher education practices – online or not – seldom integrate networked approaches to any significant extent (Siemens & Weller, 2011). Nonetheless, the capacity for networking exists in any online course that integrates some form of chat system with user profiles: there is potential for peers to connect with peers and develop autonomous channels of information flow that bypass the traditional top-down model of teacher-centered learning.

In a conventional online course offered via learning management system (LMS), the uptake of this capacity may be minimal unless fostered by faculty and by course environment. In a MOOC, this is equally true. However, some form of networked discussion does appear to be a common feature of most MOOC environments: it was noted from a 2013 survey of 103 MOOC professors conducted by The Chronicle of Higher Education that "it was not unusual for a professor to be drawn into the discussion forums" (Kolowich, 2013, "Price of Free Teaching," para. 3). The Coursera Fundamentals of Online Learning course that was suspended without notice in February of 2013 was speculated to have closed in part because the participatory Google Docs discussion became chaotic (Jaschik, 2013). These reports suggest, then, that almost all MOOCs do enable some level of networked engagement, whether or not they scaffold it effectively.

My premise is that this possibility of open, networked participation may become more powerful at a massive scale than in a conventionally sized online course, due to a version of the network effect, whereby "the more people use a service then the more useful those users find it, thus recommending it and adding more users" (Siemens & Weller, 2011, p. 166). As Anderson (2004) notes, "The greatest affordance of the web for educational use is the profound and multifaceted increase in communication and interaction capability" (p. 42): where MOOCs enable and foster peer-to-peer participation and the generation and sharing of knowledge between learners, the ethos of new literacies is being spread at a massive scale.

Understanding MOOC Models: The cMOOC and the xMOOC

This premise is an extension of reflective MOOC research undertaken in 2010. I took my first MOOC in the Spring of that year, as one of a few hundred active participants in an exploratory course called Futures of Education ("EdFutures" for short). It was an independent, distributed, non-institutional offering based in what has become known as the connectivist or cMOOC approach. A variety of avenues were available for participation in the course: there was a central discussion forum on the main course site, and regularly facilitated participatory sessions in Elluminate Live!, but we were encouraged to use our own blogs and other types of media for engagement as well. There was a Twitter hashtag aggregating all #edfutures tweets, and Downes' daily newsletter gathered, aggregated, and shared all course-related blog posts, videos, and other contributions tagged by participants. Learners were free to contribute as much or as little as we wished to the course: autonomy over our own learning was paramount. In connecting with other participants through the ideas they expressed in their blogs, I built ties that are still a valued part of my professional network today. Interaction, exploration, and contribution were emphasized over any sense of mastery or completion.

The first MOOC, Connectivism and Connected Knowledge 2008 (CCK08), was convened in 2008, when George Siemens of the University of Manitoba and Stephen Downes of the National Research Council of Canada opened up an accredited course on their work in connectivist learning theory to the public. Some 2,300 people signed up (Fini, 2009, Background section, para. 3). The model emerged iteratively and built on the already-existing work of open educators David Wiley and Alec Couros, among others, emphasizing networked practices, knowledge generation, and distributed, many-to-many channels of communication rather than the conventional teacher-centric focus of traditional courses. These early MOOCs – like those that continue to draw upon the connectivist tradition – were experimental, non-linear, and deeply dialogic and participatory. Contributions from participants frequently direct the course of discussion, and the connections and ideas built between learners can be considered as valuable as the knowledge expounded by the facilitator.

Most MOOCs, of course, are no longer cMOOCs. Since the term MOOC was first applied to the open Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course offered by Stanford University in Fall 2011, a different model of MOOC has emerged. This model is focused around formalized courses from elite university partners. Sometimes called xMOOCs as distinct from the less well-known connectivist offerings, many of these courses center more on delivery of course content than on the participatory exploration characterized by cMOOCs. The majority of claims around MOOC revolution and disruption cohere around the xMOOC model, which more closely parallels that of the conventional university.

However, not all xMOOCs are the same. Some, like Udacity and Coursera operate for profit, while EdX and the UK's Futurelearn operate as non-profit platforms. Their individual course offerings are for the most part under the purview of participating institutions and thus are far from a single or unified entity. Some are run on very similar pedagogical principles to the networked cMOOCs; others are very much the opposite. In Winter 2013, I registered for and completed The University of Edinburgh's E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC run through Coursera, which emphasized peer networking and student sensemaking contributions, including peer grading of the digital artifacts that made up the final assignment. The learning experience this course offered was structurally and pedagogically similar to that of a cMOOC.

The distinctions individual university partners and teaching faculty may make regarding their given courses needs to be kept in mind when generalizing about MOOC models. Although cMOOCs tend towards a more participatory approach and thus arguably are more significant for digital literacies development, it can be proposed that any combination of massiveness and openness creates potential for a MOOC to expose learners to participatory concepts and literacies surrounding learning.

Massiveness as the Scaling of Education

The argument for literacies development within MOOCs depends not only on the fostering of participatory forms of engagement within massive open online environments, but also on particular pedagogical and conceptual approaches to learning, massiveness, and openness. These approaches are ethos-focused, differentiating them from the market- and metrics-focused perspectives through which MOOCs are most commonly portrayed in media.

So what does "massive" mean, in MOOCs? Within the online context, massiveness is frequently used as a synonym for the concept of scale, or the vast growth potential reputedly offered by digital technologies. The question of whether MOOCs can effectively "scale" education is a central one in the ongoing debate. In educational administration contexts, however, scale has traditionally been taken up in terms of its origins in Spencer's (1974) economies of scale principle. As a business concept, the idea of economies of scale references a curvilinear relationship between management costs and items produced, with cost advantages obtained due to increased size.

The distinctions between the network and educational administration/business positions expose vast differences in fundamental assumptions. The latter view emphasizes massiveness as a numeric quantity or return on investment (ROI).

Economies of scale perspectives on optimal class and school size per investment per student have long been applied to public education, and are part of the research literature dating back to Hirsch (1959) and Cohn (1968). However, Spencer's (1974) framework for scale in education is built on the premise of repeatable processes delivering identical products or services. The economies of scale lens and its emphasis on efficiency and effectiveness assumes a simple in-out delivery model of learning.

In Internet and network terminology, usage of the term scale doesn't always imply the maximization goal suggested by the economies of scale lens. In the cMOOC model, "massive" is not intended to signify potential ROI, but the size and capacity of the course network that remixes and generates new knowledge. This in turn reflects a view of learning as participatory rather than transmission-based.

Information vs. Communications Perspectives on Education and Technologies

These competing views on scale have notable parallels in other cultural conversations on the intersection of education and technologies. Weller's (2007) work suggests that two dominant perspectives shape the cultural conversation on e-learning in general: one foregrounds information and resources as the core of the learning process, and the second focuses on communications as key to a productive learning environment. Perspectives on MOOCs also fall broadly into these two categories. Thus, while this paper argues that all MOOC models can be framed on a pedagogical spectrum contributing to literacies development, my argument itself is located within the communications-focused view of learning and technologies.

This is not the dominant view within business, venture capital, or educational administration circles and thus is not a central part of the messaging being shared about MOOCs in media. Rather, MOOC hype tends to promote information and technology-focused perspectives on education. The information perspective is premised on the assumption of clear parameters around what needs to be known, and on mastery of content as the mark of successful delivery. It emphasizes maximization and product rather than learning as a process.

Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, commented in a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio interview in February 2013: "we now have the technology for professors to teach not just 50 students at a time but 50,000." Ng's emphasis on scale asserts that the mere capacity to enroll and deliver content to large numbers of students equates to teaching them. It fits with the larger, popular media narrative that focuses on MOOCs as a technological phenomenon focused on efficiencies.

In the CBC interview, Ng noted that in his previous role as a Stanford professor, he taught approximately 400 students a year, whereas in his first open online course, there were 100,000 registrants. His conclusion was that he would have had to "teach for 250 years to reach that audience" (Noorani, 2013).

Ng's vision for MOOCs and higher education appears to center around assumptions that increasing numbers has no effect on learning except to increase the numbers of those engaged in the process. Stemming from what Chandler (2011) calls a "technology-led theory of social change" ("Technology-Led Theories," para. 1, emphasis in original), it deterministically reduces a complex societal phenomenon like education to a simple equation of "technology x does thing y." The rest of the factors involved in the process get obscured or intentionally dismissed: the power of the technology to act is assumed, and the power of social and human factors to affect, mitigate, or shape the adoption of the technology in their turn are left out of the conversation.

Gur and Wiley (2007) note that in this type of information-centered model, "education is often reduced to the packaging and delivery of information, in which the process of teaching is reduced to the transmission of information and courses are transformed into courseware" (p. 1). On the other hand, the communications-focused perspective emphasizes dialogue and process.

When communications are seen as key to learning, the numeric focus of the information-centered paradigm cannot be reconciled with the significant and varied body of educational research which foregrounds the importance of interactive (Dewey, 1938), situational (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and critical (Freire, 1970) perspectives on learning. The communications approach focuses on the Internet not as a technology but as a medium for human engagement. "The Internet encourages discussion, dialogue and community that is not limited by time or place. The role of educators in this world is to facilitate dialogue and support students in their understanding of resources" (Weller, 2007, p. 6).

The information-centered view fails to account for the relational focus of many educators, particularly from social science and humanities disciplines, to their practice and their understanding of what learning and teaching are. The dominance of these representations of MOOCs leads to objections to the idea of MOOCs in general, based on the premise that learning is a social and communicative practice (Bruner, 1983), and thus cannot be scaled in purely economic terms.

Digital Literacies, New Literacies

It is from a communicative practices perspective that the intersection of massiveness and openness in MOOCs – no matter their structural model – may be taken up as having sociocultural scale effects on learning and literacies.

The studies in new literacies (Barton, 1994) established the use of the plural "literacies" rather than the singular "literacy" in order to push beyond the binary of "literate" and "illiterate" that still shapes our cultural threshold-based conceptions surrounding literacy (Belshaw, 2012). Lankshear and Knobel (2007) frame new literacies as follows:

The more a literacy practice privileges participation over publishing, distributed expertise over centralized expertise, collective intelligence over individual possessive intelligence, collaboration over individuated authorship, dispersion over scarcity, sharing over ownership, experimentation over "normalization," innovation and evolution over stability and fixity, creative-innovative rule breaking over generic purity and policing, relationship over information broadcast, and so on, the more we should regard it as a "new" literacy. (p. 21)

This is what Gee (1996) calls literacies as social practices. There has been extensive research into the nuances of new cultural literacies related to technologies (Pinto, Cordón, & Gómez Díaz, 2010), particularly on the complex and multiple collection of literacies required for effective participation in digital social environments. This view of literacies broadly aligns with the communicative practices perspective on learning. Literacies are distinct from skills: Belshaw (2012) defines a skill as "a controlled activity (such as a physical action) that an individual has learned to perform," whereas "literacy depends on context and particular mediating technologies" (Literacies section, para. 2).

Belshaw (2012) notes that skills are subject to objective thresholds, whereas "literacy is a condition, not a threshold ... you cannot become literate merely through skill acquisition – there are meta-level processes also required" (Conclusion section, para. 1). In terms of these meta-processes, being digitally literate is a condition of being able to make meaning as a social practice and at a meta-level via interaction with mediating digital technologies. As Gourlay (2012) points out, however, the techno-rationalist skills lens and its focus on decontextualized procedure persists in influence: "the fundamental shift in understanding demanded by the original (once-disruptive) 'literacies' critique has been largely lost through a process of domestication of the term" (p. 97). This may reflect the dominance of information-focused perspectives related to education in the popular discourse.

MOOCs, however, can encourage meta-processing and a communications-focused approach to learning via mass-scaled networked participation. To be digitally literate is to be able to engage the connections and communications possibilities of digital technologies, in their capacity to generate, remix, repurpose, and share new knowledge as well as simply deliver existing information. Many people have no experience or conception of these types of possibilities: simply being online does not necessarily build social and communicative familiarity with what Lankshear and Knobel (2007) refer to as the "distinctive ethos" of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006). But interacting within an environment that exposes and encourages meta-level processing as well as knowledge generation, remixing, repurposing, and sharing can help create that condition of literacy. MOOCs that expose learners to these practices can serve as an introduction to participatory learning and the ethos of new literacies that accompanies it.

MOOCs in Research: The "In the Open" Knowledge Synthesis Project

This claim is in keeping with those of the 2010 research project entitled "In the Open: The MOOC Model as Digital Practice" (McAuley et al., 2010) funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project was a narrative knowledge synthesis project exploring the MOOC model for open education and organizational collaboration through networks. Its goal was to introduce MOOCs – which were then an unknown phenomenon – into the Canadian research landscape, and to posit them as an ecosystem for the development of digital practices.

In 2010, all MOOCs were cMOOCs: the intersection of elite universities and venture capital that has since had the name MOOC grafted onto its operations had not yet emerged. Each of us on the research team drew on our MOOC experiences as well as our separate research areas to outline MOOCs as a way of learning in a networked world.

The project articulated the ways in which MOOCs encourage the practical and conceptual development of the participatory, networked practices and literacies that social media privilege. It focused on how networked interactions create new frameworks for what knowledge is. "While the industrial age was defined by mega-corporations and mass production, digital tools and connectivity open up a range of new and creative knowledge possibilities for individuals and networks" (McAuley et al., 2010, p. 9). In the cMOOC model of education, learners' capacity to contribute to knowledge is foregrounded.

The conclusions of the project were that MOOCs, as we understood them at the time, embody the participatory ethos of digital practices in their reputational, relational, and networked operations. The research narratives collected suggested that immersive participation in MOOCs helps foreground and develop the kinds of skills and literacies required for successful participation in distributed digital networks and the larger digital economy: participants in cMOOCs, at least, are exposed to a distributed network in which a reputational and networked identity can be developed (McAuley et al., 2010, p. 35). They gain experience with the concept of participatory engagement, as cMOOCs are dialogic environments focused on generating new knowledge. "The experience of negotiating knowledge in a network, among a large group of people with potentially divergent or even contradictory results, is one of the digital literacies that a MOOC makes available to learners" (McAuley et al., 2010, p. 35).

The decentralized, distributed nature of this type of communication of one's learning builds on the particular capacities of digital technologies: replicability enables remix and repurposing, searchability enables navigation of decentralized environments, and scalable sharing may lead to unintended audiences. cMOOCs enable and encourage open, participatory work among learners, where the audience is not solely or even primarily the instructor, but rather peers:

The emergent, self-defined nature of the MOOC capitalizes on the strengths that individuals bring to it in terms of their experiences, knowledge, skills with a range of collaborative software environments and perhaps most importantly, with the "soft skills" essential for successful negotiation and collaboration. In all these dimensions, successful participation in a MOOC parallels and scaffolds successful participation in the larger digital economy. (McAuley et al., 2010, p. 5)

MOOCs at the time had no business model and ran on volunteer investments of time, energy, and knowledge, so their ultimate reach in total numbers was likely to be limited to incremental networked growth. Nonetheless, our premise was that they could, given enough enrollment over the long term, gradually alter the sociocultural concept of digital practice from a closed, hierarchical technology model to an open, networked one.

Openness and Network Literacies

The In the Open project (McAuley et al., 2010) and its conclusions were based on the communicative learning perspective premise that openness is an immersive, networked practice in which conditions of literacy and meta-processing are gradually attained. Openness, like scale, has multiple usages: open content, open educational resources, and open access are all important movements in contemporary education. But all these forms of "open" tend to be tied in some way to the paths by which the Internet bypasses closed and traditionally monetized systems. There is another form of "open" that the Internet makes possible, and it is tied to a concept of value that does not necessarily monetize well. It is "open" as opposed to closed, signifying public, peer-oriented communications and connections emphasizing iterative, collaborative, process-focused knowledge generation.

It is the kind of work that cMOOCs were developed to enable. The model, in effect, frames learners as scholars: as identities with their own ideas to contribute and disseminate, rather than as conventional students. Pearce, Weller, Scanlon, and Kinsley (2010) define open scholarship as "embracing the open values, ideology and potential of technologies born of peer-to-peer networking and wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society" (p. 5). While open scholarship focuses on the networked practices of formal academics rather than the motley collection of teachers, faculty, laypeople, and conventional students who have tended to gravitate to cMOOCs' education-focused topics, the open knowledge generation that has emerged from cMOOCs has resulted in formal academic papers as well as a broad, ongoing body of blog posts and shared ideas that might be thought of as what Veletsianos and Kimmons (2012) frame as "networked participatory scholarship" (p. 766).

There are significant issues, however, between this type of open knowledge generation and the legitimacy structures of the traditional academy. Burton (2009) explores the conflicts between the open practices he claims dominate online participatory culture and those of academic culture:

One would think openness would be consistent with the ideals of a liberal education or academic freedom, but those ideals are endorsed only insofar as content is concerned: one can research or study anything; one may not, however, depart from institutionalized formats, venues, or procedures for making or sharing knowledge (that is, if one wishes to receive academic credit for one's efforts). (para. 2)

cMOOCs have always existed more or less on the periphery of the academy, occasionally enhancing credentialed courses by opening them to the public but operating as complements rather than competition. As a result, the conflict Burton addresses seldom manifested in the cMOOC model in spite of its participatory nature, as cMOOCs never aimed to replace conventional educational offerings.

xMOOCs, on the other hand, have been positioned directly as a threat to the traditional structures of the academy. Ironically, most appear designed to pose little overt threat to the conventions and exclusivity of academic knowledge management, appearing instead to "exploit the advantages of online communication without letting such communication challenge its expertise model" (Burton, 2009, para. 4). But the very fact that they have been touted in media as a revolution may position them to reach a wide enough audience to begin to effect a sociocultural shift in participatory, networked literacies. It is the scale of MOOCs – both in the sense of their individual large classes and their status as a rapidly emerging cultural phenomenon – that makes them an inadvertent Trojan horse for the introduction of peer-to-peer concepts and literacies about learning.

MOOCs to date have drawn millions of registrants worldwide, with 4 million alone signing up for Coursera courses (Anders, 2013). Many of those learners certainly will not finish their courses, in the conventional sense; the attrition rate in MOOCs is high (Jordan, 2013). There has been minimal published research yet on what happens with so-called MOOC dropouts, and whether or not the term dropout is appropriate. Without barriers of payment or qualification in place, some learners may simply register because they can, with the goal of looking around rather than actually engaging with course materials. Others have goals different from those intended by the instructors, institution, or course provider. Still, even discounting the high percentages that do not complete, hundreds of thousands of people are slowly beginning to engage in MOOCs.

When we argued in the In the Open project (McAuley et al., 2010) that cMOOCs could have an eventual effect on society's digital literacies if enough people eventually registered, we still thought in terms of five, perhaps maximum six digits. Instead, the xMOOC model rocketed past registration expectations in months. And in this paper, I posit that institutions placing their proverbial eggs in the basket of this type of educational future may well be undermining their own positions as purveyors of closed, expert knowledge.

Many xMOOCs may be designed and intended to maintain the expertise model and the market share of elite universities over the specter of knowledge abundance and participatory culture. However, so long as the courses as platforms continue to enable participatory networking and engagement among students, they effectively begin to sow the very seeds of new literacies that challenge and undermine that instrumentalist perspective on education and expertise. Even contained within the most restrictive LMS and confined to a discussion board, learners in courses on the xMOOC spectrum nonetheless are exposed, in effect, to a fledgling network. The network effect of peer-oriented communications and connections and process-focused knowledge generation may thus be difficult to contain entirely, particularly at scale. Thus xMOOCs in their very success may end up creating conditions for the development of open, communications-focused, peer-to-peer literacies about learning.

New Literacies and Roles for Teachers and Students

It is particularly in the shifting of teacher and student roles that I suggest MOOCs may inadvertently create conditions for the development of new, participatory literacies.

First, in all MOOCs that enable voluntary, open, free registration, learners set some of their own terms for participation in a way that differs from conventional higher education offerings. The fact that a learner need not qualify nor complete a MOOC in order to be considered a legitimate student within that course creates a very different relationship to course requirements and to the instructor, and alters learners' agency over the terms of their experiences. This decentered, fluid notion of what a course is corresponds with the participatory ethos outlined by Lankshear and Knobel (2007).

Opening a course to the public involves loosening the rigid expectations around goals and completion that have conventionally framed our approaches to formalized learning environments. We are acculturated to formalized educational offerings being either mandatory – as in public K-12 education – or to institutions charging us for the privilege of registration. Course completion is prioritized. With cost and qualifications removed as barriers, however, many people may register out of mere curiosity, or without the goal of completion in mind. Others may have no reasonable capacity or preparation to engage with the material.

Thus MOOC instructors' role simply cannot be to ensure that all registrants complete the course, even if enrollment numbers are not particularly high. In a sense, registration in a MOOC may be more akin to the commitment made by showing up for a conventional free public lecture than that made by paying for registration. Openness – in the sense that anyone can join, for any reason he/she considers legitimate – begins to strike at foundational cultural concepts of what a course and learning are.

The second major shift that MOOCs create within teacher and student roles is that where MOOC learners do choose to engage with course expectations, relationships between teacher and students will likely foreground Lankshear and Knobel's (2007) new literacies of collaborative, distributed expertise over centralized expertise.

The academy and the traditional role of the professor are both deeply rooted in the concept of centralized expertise. In an era where knowledge materials were scarce and expensive to produce and share, access was centralized in institutions such as libraries, monasteries, or universities. Within the university model, professors offered the expertise necessary to navigate and interpret the resources in question. In this centralization of expertise, particular power relations between the roles of teacher and student were and are implied wherein the teacher's knowledge is that which is valued and the flow of information moves only in a single direction. These implicit structures do not foster the generation of new collaborative knowledge or the collective intelligence, sharing, or experimentation that Lankshear and Knobel (2007) frame as "new" literacies. Too often, even in an era of knowledge abundance, the structures and roles through which we organize learning experiences are designed on pre-digital concepts of what is possible and valid.

Thus traditional models of education have the teacher at the center, providing knowledge, structure, care and validation of a student's learning. Learning and value can and do come from this approach, though the model can condition learners to approach learning situations as if they are vessels to be filled, rather than active, central participants in their own meaning-making (Freire, 1970). For all that pedagogical research over recent decades has emphasized the transition from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side" (King, 1993), aspects of the traditional educational model that are premised in scarcity have proven deeply resilient and self-replicating.

But the larger the MOOC, I propose, the more it destabilizes the centrality of the teacher's role within the course. This may appear counter-intuitive: the larger the group of learners, the more the facilitator may stand out at first as the only identifiable figure in a sea of unknown names or faces. However, at massive scale, that relationship cannot be expected to be directly reciprocal. Even where a MOOC instructor centers a course on his or her expertise, the scale of the class violates the convention of personal focus and contact between teacher and student. In MOOCs with 20,000 or even 2,000 students, teachers cannot humanly assess and validate the mastery of those learners.

In one sense this mirrors large face-to-face introductory courses within conventional university systems. But within asynchronous and even minimally networked environments like those of an online LMS or discussion board, learners seeking engagement and validation can encounter and engage with peers in ways not conventionally acceptable in synchronous lecture halls. Thus the one-way flow of information that characterizes traditional learning environments begins to be interrupted, and the teacher begins to be decentered as the core arbiter of the learning experience.

This was foreshadowed in the In the Open project, where in the narrative inquiry section of the research, we reflected on the altered roles of student and teacher in MOOCs:

Overall ... it is the relational and role-based aspects of the MOOC that are perhaps the greatest departure and adjustment for course participants. Schooling trains us, even in spite of progressive pedagogies, towards a relational status quo where power and knowledge still inhere in the role of teacher. The MOOC model represents a different engagement that reflects the norms of digital interactions and social media culture far more than traditional education. (McAuley et al., 2010, p. 21)

A teacher, then, should not and generally cannot be the sole focus of a student's experience in a MOOC. Recognition of this is evidenced by Harvard University's March 2013 call for alumni of their Ancient Greek Hero course to serve as unpaid mentors and monitors within the course discussion forums (Pérez-Peña, 2013). While there has been necessary concern over the labor implications of this request – and of MOOCs in general – (Rees, 2013) the incorporation of informal, semi-peer facilitators and mentors suggests an opening up of institutional control over expertise and knowledge management.

Thus the very massiveness of a MOOC decenters the teacher's role as knower and exposes learners to a context in which the new literacy of distributed expertise has value. Ironically, it may be in this type of unintentional fostering of participatory literacies that MOOCs post their most dramatic threat to traditional notions and practices of higher education. If enough people try MOOCs, and begin to see themselves as learners with agency to contribute knowledge and determine what they take from a course experience, this may effect a gradual sociocultural shift towards participatory, communicative concepts of learning.

Conclusion

MOOCs' particular combination of massiveness and openness may expose a large population of learners to new digital literacies and learning roles via exposure to open, decentered practices and distributed expertise. From a social communications and learning-focused perspective, this means that massiveness may have important implications for education beyond the economies of scale framework. Even if few of the largest MOOCs are currently designed to resemble Trojan horses for participatory culture, they nonetheless have the potential to expose large sectors of society to new literacies and meta-level processing around the idea of learning as a communicative practice. The capacity for networked interaction may itself be subject to network effects and, therefore, scale and encourage a digital literacies ethos of distributed expertise, increased peer-to-peer participation, collaboration, and knowledge generation.

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Liminal Participants and Skilled Orienteers: Learner Participation in a MOOC for New Lecturers

         Liminal Participants and Skilled Orienteers:
Learner Participation in a MOOC for New Lecturers

Marion Waite
Senior Lecturer and Brookes Teaching Fellow
Department of Clinical Health Care
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford OX3 0BP UK
mwaite@brookes.ac.uk

Jenny Mackness
Independent Education Consultant
Lancaster LA6 1ND UK
jenny.mackness@btopenworld.com

George Roberts
Educational Developer (E-Learning)
Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford OX3 0BP UK
groberts@brookes.ac.uk

Elizabeth Lovegrove
Learning Technologist
Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford OX3 0BP UK
ejlovegrove@brookes.ac.uk

Abstract

This case study explored learner participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), a short massive open online course (MOOC) aimed at introducing learning and teaching in higher education that was offered by Oxford Brookes University in June 2012. Both novice and experienced MOOC learners joined the course. The aim of the case study was to explore triggers for active participation. A mixed-methods approach was utilized in order to collect and analyze data from focus groups, individual interviews, participant blog posts, and a survey. The lenses of social constructivism, connectivism, and community of practice theories were used to enhance understanding of participation in FSLT12. Three main themes emerged: (1) Navigation: New participants felt overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a perceived need to multitask, while experienced learners were judicious about planning their route; (2) Transformative learning: Ultimately, learners experienced a transformative shift, but it required reflection on practice, community support, and self-organization; (3) Reciprocal Relationships: New learners needed time to determine their audience and core community, as well as to realize mutual relationships within that community. Learners in a MOOC inhabit a liminal space. Active MOOC participants are skilled orienteers. Engaging local expertise of experienced MOOC learners and developing participatory skills in new learners is a key strategy for those who organize and facilitate MOOCs.

Keywords: massive open online course (MOOC), connectivist massive open online course (cMOOC), threshold concepts, navigation, liminality, transformative learning, participation, reciprocity

Introduction and Background

This case study explores the learner experience of participation in First Steps in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (FSLT12), which was offered by Oxford Brookes University over a five-week period during May and June 2012 for new lecturers in higher education and was one of the very first massive open online courses (MOOCs) to be run in the United Kingdom. FSLT12, which was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and The Higher Education Academy (HEA) program on open educational resources, was modest in MOOC terms in that it attracted 206 participants. Nevertheless, this case study demonstrates some important issues about the experience of MOOC participation from the perspective of the learner, which may determine active participation.

Other researchers (Chamberlin & Parish, 2011; Cormier, 2010a, 2010b; McAuley, Stewart, Siemens, & Cormier, 2010; Weller, 2011) have identified potential advantages of MOOC participation, for example opportunities to build personal networks and make connections beyond the content of a course. In spite of these espoused benefits, it has been acknowledged that participation in a MOOC may be challenging and troublesome:

Participation in a MOOC is emergent, fragmented, diffuse, and diverse. It can be frustrating. It's not unlike life. (Bonnie Stewart, in her narrative introduction in McAuley et al., 2010, p. 5)

Evaluation of FSLT12

An evaluation strategy for FSLT12 was integrated with the course design. An identified goal was to gain more knowledge about the experiences of a diverse group of participants, their interaction with content and with one another during FSLT12.

The research and evaluation approach was initially identified as a general topic to understand more about differential participation within FSLT12. Refinement of specific research questions followed feedback from the project critical friend (who was assigned by JISC/HEA) and were as follows:

What was the learner experience of participation in FSLT12?How did learners interact with content in FSLT12?How did learners interact with each other in FSLT12?Bonnie Stewart (in her narrative introduction in McAuley et al, 2010) identifies a range of inhibiting factors for participation within a MOOC. These include not appealing to those most comfortable in a formal educational environment, lack of accreditation, lack of familiarity with the digital skills required, lack of access to the tools required for participation, lack of scaffolding and support, language barriers, lack of netiquette, technology ownership and bandwidth, time zones, volume of information, mastering content, and reading blog and discussion posts.

George Siemens (in his narrative introduction in McAuley et al, 2010) suggests that knowledge of how participants engage or interact with content and each other is a little-known territory. The nature of an open learning platform, which relies on connections between learners in order to autonomously aggregate, remix, repurpose, and feed forward, poses many questions about the fostering of active participation (Kop, Fournier & Mak, 2011). Aggregation, remixing, repurposing, and feeding forward were explained by Stephen Downes in his introduction to the Change11 MOOC (see Downes, 2011). Aggregation refers to selecting the content of a MOOC that is most relevant to the individual participant, remixing refers to keeping a personal record of everything the individual has accessed within a MOOC, repurposing consists of the individual participant creating some content of their own, and feed forward involves sharing that with others.

There is a need for more evidence to guide the implementation of MOOCs and for more evaluations of the educational benefits (Bujack, Paul, & Sandulli, 2012). This case study aims to add to a growing body of knowledge in this domain. The intended audience is higher education lecturers, educational developers, and related support staff, in addition to the international community who have a pedagogical and research interest in MOOCs.

MOOC Principles and FSLT12 Design

A MOOC differs from a formal online course in that it is open and distributed within Internet social spaces. The term "MOOC" was coined in 2008 by Dave Cormier as a description of the phenomenon of George Siemens and Stephen Downes' open online course at Athabasca University, called Connectivism and Connected Knowledge 2011 (CCK11), which attracted over 2,300 participants ("Massive Open Online Course," 2012).

The underlying philosophy was a notion of connectedness, which is underpinned by creating and maintaining a personal network of connections and interacting with and creating content. Importantly, individuals choose at what level they might participate. There are four underlying principles, namely autonomy, diversity, openness, and interactivity (Downes, 2009). The design of FLST12 attempted to reflect these principles. The course design team consisted of a senior educational developer who leads a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, an experienced lecturer in nursing who was seconded to the team, a learning technologist, and an independent education consultant who was an experienced MOOC participant and facilitator. A common thread that was shared within the team was considerable prior experience as distance learning online tutors who were motivated to learn about how a connectivist approach to course design might inform their ongoing online teaching practices.

The FSLT12 curriculum was based on a short non-accredited three-day, on-campus course offered by Oxford Brookes University as an introduction to teaching and learning in higher education and is underpinned by the U.K. Professional Standards Framework for Teaching and Supporting Learning in Higher Education (HEA, 2011). FSLT12 ran for a period of six weeks and each week featured a specific theme from the First Steps curriculum: supporting learning, reflective practice, teaching groups, feedback, lecturing, and evaluation.

FSLT12 was free of charge for all participants; 20 free assessed places were offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Assessment, which was non-accredited, consisted of a reflective statement, participation within an annotated collaborative bibliography activity, and preparation and showcasing of a 10-minute microteaching activity during the final synchronous sessions. Participants who completed the assessment were awarded a certificate of attendance. The delivery of FSLT12 was considered to be a pilot for a potential accredited postgraduate module, which will continue to run in the future as a MOOC.

Openness

A unique intention of running FSLT12 as a MOOC was to introduce the concept of open academic practice to the target audience by offering a traditional course within an open online platform. All of the course material and interaction was openly available on the public web (with the exception of a discussion forum set up for assessed participants). The learning platform consisted of an open WordPress site and an open Moodle virtual learning environment for prepared resources and discussion forums. Five synchronous audiographic sessions were offered within a Blackboard Collaborate environment, featuring an introduction to the course from the facilitators as well as three sessions, which were led by guest speakers: Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner, Frances Bell, and Dave White. Directions to the synchronous classroom were posted on the open WordPress site, which served as an entrance portal to the course. This meant that formal enrollment was not necessary to attend those sessions, to view the recordings afterwards, to access any of the learning materials or read the discussion forums. The only form of course participation that required registration was posting on the discussion forums.

Autonomy

Openness offered participants a wide variety of ways to engage with the course and freedom to set their own patterns of participation. Casting the course as a MOOC explicitly gave participants permission to engage in the ways and quantities they wished, with no requirement to be involved in all aspects of the course. Participants were also empowered to choose their own pathways through the available material, dipping in for particular topics or materials, skipping others, and, as the course materials all remain available, to engage with materials at the time and in the order of their choosing. This autonomy operated on several different levels and means that it is impossible to trace all of the shades of course engagement and quantify how much each was used. Different amounts of participation were possible from reading a single tweet, up to extensive activity in all discussion forums and live sessions, and at all levels in between. The preferences and interests of each individual participant or observer mean that engagement with the course will look different for each person.

There was anticipation that many of the target audience (new lecturers) might be MOOC neophytes, so scaffolding strategies to enable interactions with earlier adopters was an important course design consideration. A range of relevant open educational resources (OER) was therefore developed or harvested prior to the start of FSLT12, and integrated into the WordPress site under the heading "Tutorials," with the specific purpose of presenting guides to acquiring participatory skills.

Diversity

FSLT12 was targeted at new lecturers, Ph.D. students who teach, and people moving into higher education from other sectors. The team anticipated diversity within this group. A significant proportion of the course participants did fit those categories. There were people who were completely new to higher education and to learning online, but who had chosen the course because it was more convenient than its face-to-face equivalent. Others were experienced MOOC participants, and experienced lecturers, interested in refreshing their practice, or sharing their expertise.

There were 206 official registrants for FSLT12, which may be considered small in MOOC terms but given that FSLT12 had a specific course topic and was delivered during a year where many other MOOCs were offered this may not be surprising. Downes (2013a) suggests that a concept of massive may not necessarily be conceived as engaging many numbers of people," but in the design elements that make educating many people possible."

FSLT12 attracted higher numbers than the face-to-face equivalent (where numbers average 20 to 30) and participants were more geographically diverse, from 24 different countries including Australia, Canada, India, and South Africa, as well as many European countries and the United States. Downes (2013a) makes the point that when a course is massive in its design elements, it should not create bottlenecks. This means that it should not rely on the teacher to give feedback to the learner but enable many one-to-one interactions so that feedback may come from a range of sources.

An additional pedagogical approach to the MOOC has emerged, which is based on a different perspective that focuses on a single open platform, instruction, learning outcomes, self-directed learning, and course content. Udacity, which was founded by Sebastian Thrun in 2011, is an example of this. This phenomenon has conflated the understanding of MOOCs; the emphasis on "the massive" within these courses is scale of numbers, sometimes in excess of 150,000 participants. These are referred to as xMOOCs, whereas connectivist-influenced MOOCs are known as cMOOCs (Sloep, 2012).

Interactivity/Connectedness

Support for interaction was provided through the aggregation of blogs in the WordPress site, through centralized discussion forums in Moodle and through a suggested Twitter hashtag (#fslt), which was used extensively. These support mechanisms allowed users to easily follow conversations about the course and to connect to others discussing similar issues, without the need to otherwise engage with the course. In addition, participants were encouraged to interact and connect in locations of their own choosing, resulting, for example in a small group of participants meeting face-to-face.

Reflecting on a Review of the Literature

A review of the current literature has highlighted that there is limited emergent evidence on how participants interact with content and each other within a MOOC. Apparent themes are: multitasking, benefits and risks of openness, digital identity, and communities of practice.

Multitasking is a required skill for active participation. Levy's (2010) account of personal experience as a new MOOC learner in Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge (PLENK 2010) suggested that it was very complex to organize a personal learning network, and considered that time management skills were a key factor to overcome this; in addition, a significant level of personal motivation was required in order to sustain participation. A lot of the learning happened in back channels, but it required multitasking to in order to achieve this. MOOC organizers can facilitate some of this by providing daily newsletters or summaries of participant activity.

There are benefits and risks associated with openness; the fact that access is enabled for a diverse range of participants means that the less experienced can benefit from expertise beyond the realms of a normal course (Kikkas, Lannpere, & Põldoja, 2011). MOOCs have been described as a model of "digital practice" as they can develop the skills of individuals so that they can participate within a digital economy (McAuley et al., 2010). Weller (2011) suggests that access to participation in education may be widened by MOOCs, as there are fewer prerequisites than in formal education. Risks include the need for prerequisite critical literacies such as the ability to learn autonomously and maintain a level of presence within a MOOC (Kop et al., 2011). Participation in a MOOC represents engagement in norms of digital interactions, which may present a good learning opportunity but can be challenging for those new to these expectations (McAuley et al., 2010). The size of a MOOC cohort can be overwhelming and it can be challenging for the learner to make sense of many voices (Chamberlin & Parish, 2011). The learner is provided with more global connections than a traditional course, exposure to diverse views, and an abundance of resources and sharing of experiential knowledge, but is more likely to participate if there is potential for credit (Chamberlin & Parish, 2011).

Participation can be either enhanced or inhibited by learner digital identity – for example, the difference between having a confident voice within digital worlds compared to feeling that you have nothing worthwhile to contribute, and the role of participant as knowledge builder may feel alien to some learners (McAuley et al., 2010).

The work of Hrastinski (2008, 2009) suggests that there are varying perspectives on how participation within online communities of practice can be conceptualized. This includes levels of participation from accessing the online environment to taking part and joining in a dialogue, the perspective of learners, and quantitative measures such as numbers of postings, lengths of postings, and time spent reading postings. Hrastinski makes the point that online learning participation is a complex and evolving process for the learner, which involves taking part and building relations with others and involves a number of activities and feelings such as thinking, feeling, belonging, and communicating; counting numbers alone is an insufficient measure of participation. Lurking is seen as a legitimate level of participation and an activity that shows potential for more active participation. This is an important consideration for exploration of participation in a MOOC and, in particular, the identification of triggers or processes that transform lurking to active participation.

Theoretical Frameworks

Although cMOOCs are considered by some to be underpinned by connectivist principles (Cormier, 2010a, 2010b) it would appear that the development of MOOCs has been influenced by a combination of theoretical perspectives (Bujack et al., 2012; Kop, 2011; Levy, 2010) such as constructivism, connectivism, and the concept of communities of practice. Hrastinski (2008) suggests that research frameworks for high-level conceptions of online learner participation include a variety of options and identifies constructivism and communities of practice as appropriate frameworks. Sfard (1998) argues that within educational research there can be a case for consideration of more than one theory for learning because each perspective can offer exclusive benefits. The rationale for this is argued within this case study, which was informed by constructivism, connectivism, and communities of practice.

Constructivism

The concept of social constructivism has been influenced by Vygotsky's (1978) social learning theory, which placed prominence on collaborative learning. The learner constructs and interprets knowledge actively, and practice, prior knowledge, and experience are viewed as an important platform for ongoing learning. The design of the environment is constructed around authentic and experiential tasks such as those designed into the curriculum of FSLT12. Within a study exploring learner experience of participation in a MOOC, constructivism acknowledges the diversity of participants and aligns with the emphasis on creating and interpreting knowledge within a MOOC. In terms of interaction with content within a MOOC, constructivism embraces the purposes of learner activities such as aggregation, mixing, repurposing, and feeding forward, and includes social interaction with other participants in order to collaborate within learning activities. Constructivism, on the other hand, may not align with the role of a MOOC facilitator who is less prominent than in a normal course, as the emphasis in a MOOC is on autonomous and peer learning. The potential number of participants within a MOOC may also limit a role for a central facilitator.

Connectivism

Connectivism as a learning theory (Downes, 2012; Siemens, 2005) is based on the premise that learning theories should reflect current social environments and, in particular, the influence of technology and the diverse informal settings in which modern learning takes place. Siemens (2005) critiques constructivism on the basis of the emphasis of knowledge, seen as resting with the individual; the use of technology has altered this premise as knowledge is viewed as residing within systems. Connectivism puts an emphasis on lifelong learning and also integrates chaos and complexity as important concepts, to prepare learners for working in a more unpredictable world and support the development of relevant skills in self-organization and decision making. The theory is that learners will create their own personal networks by making connections with people and ideas across a distributed digitally networked world. Learners will also be enabled to identify their own connections to support their ongoing learning. The pursuit of current and up-to-date knowledge is a desirable outcome. Bell (2011) has critiqued connectivism as an incomplete learning theory in that it may be insufficient to explain what has worked well in practice. However, the theory may be helpful in exploring how participants interact with content and each other in a MOOC, especially if the topic relates to continuing professional development (CPD) such as in FSLT12.

Communities of Practice

Wenger (1998) has presented key ideas about what it means to participate within a community of practice. He suggests that it is a complex, active process of participation and mutual recognition. Within any given community of practice this will lead to personal identity building. Participation within a community of practice leads to a perspective on the knowledge, which is considered to be valuable and effective for that community. Hrastinski (2008) has identified that community of practice theory conceptualizes the complexity of participation and the association of participation with learning.

Wenger, Trayner, and de Laat (2011) differentiate between a community and a network and do not necessarily view participation as collaboration because participation can include all types of relations – for example, conflict and competition. The theory also takes into account legitimate peripheral participation and the idea that new learners within a community of practice may be viewed as apprentices and take on more active roles as they are drawn into the community.

A community of practice is seen as a learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular domain, whereas a network is seen as a group of relations, personal influences, and connections between individuals. This is a useful lens to consider how participants have interacted with each other in a MOOC where many networks may be evident: What is the relationship between community and network, and which ones are the most significant for which participants? It is also a useful lens for exploring learner participation within a MOOC and self-evaluation of participation, as well as to identify strategies that may encourage active participation. Wenger (1998) never intended communities of practice to be a standalone theory. In this case study, community of practice theory is used to complement the theories of constructivism and connectivism as an overall theoretical framework.

Methods

The methodology was a case study that employed a mixed methods approach. Bryman (2012) describes trends in social research and in particular the expansion of mixed methods research as a strategy to provide a more complete picture of a phenomenon. A MOOC has potential to offer researchers useful and comprehensive data and in particular digitally archived records of participant activity and interactions. A quantitative analysis of these was used to illustrate trends in participation, which were explored in more depth with a course evaluation questionnaire, followed up with focus groups, individual interviews, and a survey of participatory experience. The aim was to provide rigor within the case study by what Bryman describes as completeness in addressing the specific research questions, and to provide triangulation of the data, which helps to identify important connections to provide a detailed account of what counts as participation within a MOOC.

The Oxford Brookes University Research Ethics Committee granted ethical approval for the collection and analysis of primary research data from FSLT12. Participants were recruited via the main WordPress site by posting an invitation to participate in research, which included a link to a participant information sheet, consent form, and course evaluation questionnaire. Participant data was anonymized and de-identified, and permission was sought to use direct quotes from research data such as personal blogs, interviews, and survey research data.

Sample

The focus of attention within the case study was FSLT12 participants, so in theory anyone who registered or participated within any element of FSLT12 could be regarded as what Bryman (2012) describes as the unit of analysis for sampling. However, in a case study making use of mixed methods, there will be a number of units within the case.

A quantitative analysis of numbers participating in specific areas of distributed open learning spaces of a MOOC potentially includes everyone who visits that learning space. Unless the space is tagged with a course identifier it may be impossible to fully estimate participation quantitatively. In FSLT12 it was possible to identify everyone who registered for the Moodle site and those who actively participated in identifiable distributed course spaces (Table 1).

Table 1. Level of participant activity in FSLT12

Actively participated within identifiable FSLT12 distributed spacesaPosted to Moodle Discussion forums (minimum of one post)Aggregated blogs at course WordPress siteAttended Blackboard Collaborate synchronous session 1Attended Blackboard Collaborate synchronous session 2Attended Blackboard Collaborate synchronous session 3Attended Blackboard Collaborate synchronous session 4

aMoodle discussion forums, aggregated personal blog, or attended a synchronous session.

Data Collection and Analysis

Just under 20% (n = 41) of registrants completed the course evaluation questionnaire via the link from the WordPress site. Respondents were given the option of remaining anonymous, so it was impossible to identify the representativeness of the sample, however it was clear that diverse participants experienced the course differently. This helped to identify a range of themes (see the Appendix to this paper) that were used to promote discussion during subsequent focus group interviews, which all registrants were invited to attend in Blackboard Collaborate. Two of these were carried out, each with an attendance of eight participants who represented a relatively diverse cross-section of members of FSLT12 in terms of experience of teaching in higher education, prior MOOC participation, international setting, and undertaking an assessed or non-assessed pathway. Active participants who represented the description of the specific target audience (new lecturers in higher education, who were undertaking the assessment pathway) were identified as a purposive sample and invited to attend individual semi-structured interviews: four of these were carried out. In order to reach a wider sweep of FLST12 registrants (in other words to include the views of those who had not been visibly active) a survey questionnaire focused on individual participation was emailed to every course registrant. Response rates were relatively low at 13.6% (n = 28), but over half of the respondents said that they had either read or commented on other participant blogs. Twenty-four participants aggregated their blogs at the FSLT12 WordPress site; these were found to be a rich source of reflective commentary on course experience and were considered to be a source of relevant research data. This was a complex sampling strategy, which aimed to capture data taking into account the diverse ways in which individuals chose to participate within FSLT12 (Table 2).

Table 2. Data collection for the case study – sample sources and sizes

Course evaluation questionnaire, link posted on course siteQuantitative measures of individual active participation in distributed spaces and FSLT12 discussion forumsFocus group interviews x 2 in synchronous audiographic platformThematic analysis of aggregated blogsSurvey questionnaire on experience of participation e-mailed to all FSLT12 registrantsThe analysis of quantitative data was statistically insignificant. However in mixed methods research it is recommended that sources of data are integrated (Bryman, 2012). Data collected from the course evaluation questionnaire, focus group interviews, individual interviews, survey, and aggregated blog posts were thematically analyzed (see the Appendix) with reference to the research questions defined earlier.

The overall thematic analysis (see the Appendix) was returned to the focus group and interview research participants for member checking and verification of participatory behavior themes. During the process of FSLT12 many participants expressed an interest in research and evaluation of MOOCs, and the team felt it appropriate to be transparent about research procedures. Given the diversity of FSLT12 some participants were experienced researchers; this provided a good opportunity to review trustworthiness of the data analysis. The collected research data was also peer-reviewed by the authors who independently organized the many sources into themes and made comparisons in order to reach an overall consistent analysis.

The Learner Experience of Participation in FSLT12

Behaviors that respondents identified as participatory within FSLT12 were observing others, reading, discussion forum posting, blogging, and completion of assessment activities. Specific strategies to maintain individual participation were keeping the MOOC browser window open all the time and making a determined and deliberate attempt to participate as much as possible.

During the focus group interviews diverse identities emerged as participants spontaneously referred to themselves as "newbies" or "vets" in relation to MOOC participation. One participant described the roles as "fresh and green versus lots of MOOC experience ... such a range" (Focus group). These roles appeared to be mutually recognized.

In evaluating the learner experience of participation this dichotomy was used as a reference point to compare and contrast participatory experiences between novices and those who are experienced. Three main themes emerged: navigation, transformational shift, and scaffolding by those who were more experienced. These are discussed in turn below.

Navigation. Different routes and approaches were taken; novices felt initially overwhelmed by technical issues, multiple channels, and a need to be able to multitask, which required too many initial participatory skills incorporating "listening, reading and discussions all at the same time." (Course evaluation questionnaire)

The Moodle site was seen as "delivering too much content all at once" (Course evaluation questionnaire). The number of discussion forum posts in Moodle was highest during the opening week. An experienced participant in a blog post called this "MOOC syndrome": typical of enthusiastic starts within MOOCs, which quickly tail off. Some participants felt that FSLT12 was trying to do too much at once for a short course. Appearance of a "Welcome" discussion topic and a "Week 0" in advance of the advertised start date meant that people who had been following the developments more closely were already active and engaged in discussion by the time the advertised start date had arrived. This meant that some participants had the sense of arriving in the midst of ongoing activity. Conversely, some experienced participants felt very able to navigate the multiple channels. For example, one stated that he/she "appreciated more structure than other MOOCs [he/she had] participated in" (Course evaluation questionnaire).

Experienced participants also appeared to be more judicious about planning their route and their level of participation, as exemplified by the following quote: "This is my sixth MOOC and I chose my level of participation" (Course evaluation questionnaire). The fact that novices encountered navigation difficulties in an online environment is not unexpected and corresponds with the findings of other authors (Fini, 2009; Kop, 2011).

Transformational shift. Although novices initially felt overwhelmed, some, especially those who were undertaking the assessment route, remained active throughout the MOOC. A transformative shift was evident on realization that it is not necessary to join everything: "Initial feeling of great pressure to participate...realized eventually that there was choice about this." (Interview 1)

This did require time and reflection to reach this point. One participant commented during an interview: "Getting over that initial concern ... I realized that it was OK to observe, but that required effort, I spent a whole evening opening all of the different folders and channels, needed to immerse myself" (Interview 2). Another participant wrote: "A core moment in online participating is that when you begin to contribute after only following, observing or consuming" (Experienced participant blog).

A core moment for transformative shifts was the synchronous sessions:

"The first synchronous session was an important milestone in getting to the point where I realized I didn't have to respond to everything. When I was hearing voices and when there was time to have a conversation with others involved in similar activities." (Focus group)

Some novices viewed assessment as a lever to promote a transformational shift in identity. One of them reflected as follows: "My identity as a teacher has shifted contextually, my curiosity has been stimulated about digital literacies and developing them amongst learners and which ones are required for effective teaching" (Interview 1). This contrasted with experiences of some participants, who expressed a view that "not being assessed made it less meaningful to participate" (Survey).

Connectivist-influenced MOOCs are designed for uncertainty, and this can have an impact on participant learning experiences and sense of personal identity: "A MOOC allows me to play with uncertainty and depending on how my day is going this can be scary or liberating" (Discussion forum). Some participants recognized the effect on their identity and how this might change over time in unexpected ways: "It changed my learner identities from confidence and experienced to not having a clue and feeling like a novice" (Focus group).

Scaffolding by "experienced participants." Some registrants of FSLT12 who did not actively participate cited personal circumstances that impacted on time and commitment, but others said: "I didn't know how to participate" (Survey), and "I did try but I was intimidated by the depth of the posts and my newness to higher education" (Survey).

The expert lens of experienced participants recognized that it is challenging to engage MOOC newcomers, and an important skill is to support novices to cope with multi-channel working. One participant observed that "those that are lost are missing out on an important new literacy" (Focus group).

Assessed participants, especially novices, felt supported by the FSLT12 infrastructure and experienced participant expertise. There was more potential for peer facilitation and support for novices. This became evident in responses gathered during the focus group interviews. It was suggested that a core group of experienced volunteers could take responsibility for supporting individual groups within a cohort of novices, moderate back channels and build community at a micro level. Some of the novices reflected that they could have taken more opportunities to seek feedback and ask questions of experts. For instance, one participant said: "This was a good opportunity to participate with teachers who have been teaching for longer ... I should have realized that it was OK to ask them for help" (Interview 1).

There is a clear opportunity to establish informal networks for mentoring and potential for experienced participants to serve as support volunteers for future practice.

Learner Interaction with Content in FSLT12

Motivation to join FSLT12 was prompted by the subject matter. This was indicated on registrant signup records and applied to novices and experienced participants alike. The content of FSLT12 was identified as a clear framework for CPD and reflection.

Reflective practice. Content that focused on reflective practice appeared to prompt this. This included learning activities and assessment tasks.

This was typical of all active participants, and particular evidence of this was found within participant blogs. For example, one participant wrote:

"My goal for my work in the FSLT MOOC is to understand and practice critical reflection more effectively and to learn how to create a space where my students can develop their own. I am grateful for the opportunity to join the FSLT community." (Experienced participant blog)

Another wrote: "The content has encouraged my participation at a more thoughtful level and I have modelled reflection by using a blog" (Novice participant blog).

Reflective content of FSLT12 was viewed as a facilitative tool to stimulate personal reflections on teaching and learning and to develop personal reflective skills:

"In the previous post I described briefly what some of the experience was like as a teacher of Media Studies. I am aware that I have not provide a 'critical analysis' from a 'number of perspectives' – such as my own, the learners involved, my colleagues and indeed, the literature." (Novice participant blog)

Learner Interaction with One Another

Survey responses suggested that active participants used the following channels to interact with each other: posting to discussion forums, responding to blog posts, attending synchronous sessions, and a face-to-face meeting entitled "MOOCup," which had been arranged via Twitter.

Two main themes emerged from the thematic analysis of all of the data, making sense of community for novices and experts, and reciprocal relationships, which are discussed below.

Making sense of community for novices and experts. This category was seen as a skill that was required to "sort out who these experts and the audience are" (Interview 1). Becoming part of the community was viewed as an important confidence-builder and an opportunity to observe participatory behaviors. All interview participants were new to online teaching and they expressed the usefulness of observing how forums, blogs, and social media could be used for digital interaction and to see their use in teaching and learning practice. In the words of one participant: "This opened my eyes as a teacher" (Interview 2).

The synchronous sessions and individual blogs were important participatory areas for FSLT12, but the main thrust of observed participant interaction in FSLT12 occurred in the discussion forums. This is shown in Table 2 and evidenced in the following quote: "In the MOOC forums there is quite a lively discussion this week (as there was last week), which got me thinking. One of the things that I've been pondering is the mode of participation" (Experienced participant blog). Of the 67 active participants, 52 posted on the forums.

Reciprocal relationships. The potential for reciprocity between diverse participants as a catalyst for active engagement became gradually apparent. Novice participants developed a sense of the establishment of a core FSLT12 community after a few weeks. One participant remarked: "Interacting with experts has demonstrated different styles for pedagogy for online learning and different approaches for using technology in teaching" (Interview 3).

The fact that the MOOC was an open online environment did not occur to everyone as a significant issue. For example one interview participant had not registered awareness that presentation of the microteaching assessment was open access. However, the possibility of potential for interactions in many spaces was regarded as an advantage for gaining rich feedback from many sources:

"The interactions between my peers and the facilitators were great, there was a lot of sharing of best practices and lived experiences, and I took a lot of things away; both things that I can immediately put into practice, and things that I need to read up on :-)." (Experienced participant blog)

Focus group interviewees identified the diversity of other participants as an important aspect of learning. The international context and the professional experiences of individuals provided a positive challenge as peer observers. This was an evident outcome of the microteaching assessment. The experienced were impressed with the novices and vice versa, which prompted rich and dialogic reciprocal feedback:

"There is just nothing else quite like social, networked learning to get your brain jazzed up about something. It's about risk, exploration, learning from others who are as wildly different and deeply the same as you are, to try and fail and try some more in a safe and welcoming environment." (Experienced participant blog)

Experienced participants' blog posts demonstrated reflection on a variety of personal MOOC experiences and the strategies they employ to locate themselves within the main mode of interaction in an individual MOOC: "It seems to me, that my own personal strategy is 'biggest bang for the buck' – so wherever there are more people, that's where I participate" (Experienced participant blog).

The digital skills of experienced participants enabled them to evaluate the impact of their own contribution and how individuals are interacting with their artifacts. For example: "Google Analytics gives me information about visits to my blog during the last month" (Experienced participant blog).

Discussion

Threshold concepts have been described as akin to the opening up of a portal of understanding of previously unknown knowledge (Meyer & Land, 2003). They are a useful lens to explore why active participation led to learning for some in FSLT12.

One of the important features of a threshold concept is transformation, which means that once knowledge is understood an aspect of a practice or discipline will be transformed, irreversibly, and the learner will have crossed conceptual boundaries and have a changed discourse or identity. This is preceded by troublesome knowledge (Perkins, 2006) for the learner, where knowledge can be counterintuitive, incoherent, or alien. Another feature of a threshold concept is liminality; Meyer and Land (2003) describe this as "a suspended state of partial understanding or stuck place" (p. 10).

The theory is that as learners transcend steps in their understanding or attempt to gain mastery in their discipline or practice they will oscillate between new and old understandings. Cousin (2006) provides the example of the adolescent who will swing back and forth between child- and adult-like behaviors. Once a learner enters a liminal space they are engaged within a context for mastery. The liminal space may provide a sense of self-achievement, but may also be troublesome as personal identity shifts in an attempt to reach new understanding as old ways of doing and thinking about things are discarded, representing an ontological shift.

Learning in a cMOOC takes place over distributed platforms and in an abundance of information that many learners find overwhelming. Learners therefore need to develop skills of finding relevant information and become adept at filtering, picking and choosing information relevant to personal learning. High levels of critical capability (Kop & Bouchard, 2011) are required in addition to appropriate technical skills. This represents troublesome knowledge in a cMOOC.

Liminality was observed in FSLT12 in novice attempts to make sense of MOOC participation and observe and practice skills and behaviors associated with active participation. Reflection and time appeared to be important factors to facilitate this. The moments in FSLT12 when learners recognized the skills that were required for active participation by interacting with content and other learners was when personal learning became transformed. This could be viewed as a threshold concept and appeared significant when learners described identity shifts.

The liminal space is contrasted with the pre-liminal space where the learner remains completely static within their understanding (Meyer & Land, 2003). This could be said to correspond with those registrants for FSLT12 who stated in the survey questionnaire that they did not know how to participate; this is a significant issue for facilitators and providers of MOOCs to address. In addition the threshold concept theory suggests that once a threshold of understanding is crossed, it is hard for the learner to truly recall lack of understanding from a former pre-liminal or liminal phase. Although this case study demonstrated reciprocity between novice and experienced participants to some extent, it might be challenging for the experienced to realize or remember how difficult MOOC participation may be to those new to learning within distributed open environments.

Downes (2013a) maintains that connectivist MOOCs can enable learners to genuinely participate in the culture of a discipline by fostering the ability to operate across traverse networks, requiring learners to do something quite different from a traditional course. He provides an example of the difference between learning about physics and joining a community of physicists. This demonstrates a link between connectivism and communities of practice and also the work of Cousin (2006) on threshold concepts where the description of mastery of a discipline is exemplified in the difference between learning about economics and thinking like an economist. FSLT12 provided opportunities for novices to participate in the culture of teaching and learning in higher education by allowing participants the chance to move from learning about teaching to acting and thinking like a teacher.

Implications for Practice and Further Research

As a small group of online teachers, the team was interested in the outcomes of this case study in order to influence ongoing teaching practice. Anderson and Dron (2011) argue that high quality online learning exploits a range of pedagogies. Social constructivism was evident in FSLT12 where the facilitators developed content to stimulate discussion and placed high emphasis on dialogue in forums. As Anderson and Dron point out, the social constructivist approach is not conducive to scaling to high numbers. They suggest that a good starting point for connectivism is to expose learners to networks and provide opportunities to gain self-determination in cognitive skills for learning and making connections of their own by creating opportunities for interaction. In this case study, liminality was seen to be an issue potentially impacting upon this; however, experienced participants to some extent provided good role models and facilitated connections with novices. This suggests that there are benefits to opening up online courses to enable learning to go beyond the faculty or the institution in order to maximize diversity. There is however more knowledge needed to develop models for active participation within MOOCs, and in particular making the most of experienced and novice interactions. It is interesting to note that Anderson and Dron describe the scalability of connectivism as low to medium. It could be arguable whether FSLT12 was numerically massive given that only 206 people registered. Conole (2013) suggests that with the proliferation of MOOCs, components of specific learning design will determine the degree of scalability of a MOOC. Downes (2013b) suggests that "Dunbar's number" of 150 should be the minimum number of active participants to qualify as a "massive" course. FSLT12 was therefore massive for Week 0 only when 206 people registered on the Moodle site. More important is that FSLT12 was prepared for massiveness and was designed according to cMOOC principles.

Rodriguez's (2012) review of MOOCs estimates active participation at less than 10% in four cMOOCs of varying registrant numbers (556 to 2,700). Comparatively an active participation rate of 32% in FSLT12 (see Table 1) may be significant but would be hard to generalize beyond this case study. Watters (2012) points out the high dropout rates of MOOCs and high numbers of readers/observers/lurkers, while Rodriguez asserts that a cMOOC offers the potential learner choice about how and when to participate. This presents challenges in estimating those participants who do not visibly interact but may be actively lurking. The usefulness of counting numbers is questionable. Emerging research methodologies in technology-enabled learning such as learning analytics (Long & Siemens, 2011; Siemens, 2012) present alternative approaches for analyzing multiple and diverse interactions within a MOOC.

The authors observe that MOOC offerings are evolving rapidly with the hybridization of many cMOOC and xMOOC philosophies (Roberts, Waite, Lovegrove, & Mackness, 2013). Hybridization may lead to further knowledge about MOOC participation. Based on the authors' experiences of conducting this case study there was clear evidence of multi-MOOC participation. Some experienced participants were engaged concurrently in other MOOCs and openly compared their experiences and participatory behaviors between MOOCs and exposure to differing pedagogical philosophies. The fact that there appears to be a MOOC community who will deliberately expose themselves to many MOOC experiences makes them an interesting group for more longitudinal research to provide further insight into MOOC participation than can be provided by a single case study.

A hybrid MOOC called E-Learning and Digital Cultures (EDCMOOC) was recently offered by academics from another U.K. University, The University of Edinburgh. One of the facilitators noted (Sinclair, 2013, para. 3) that this MOOC was "stimulating a liminal state for many students," suggesting that the MOOC itself is a liminal space and a site where threshold concepts might be encountered. This resonates with the assertions made in this paper that participation within a MOOC is a threshold concept in and of itself.

Conclusion

This case study uncovered themes (see the Appendix), which were common to some active participants and derived from more than one source of data. The most frequently occurring themes were transformation of identity, reciprocal relationships, and reflective practice. Novice participants expressed initial uncertainties and experienced participants observed the difficulties they were experiencing. Reflective practice was important for active participants as an aspect of learning and a tool for self-expression.

The case study reported in this paper adds to the findings of earlier research on learner participation within MOOCs as discussed in the literature review, especially with regard to navigation across multiple channels. The course design of FSLT12 put participants in an area of troublesome knowledge and therefore a liminal space. The opportunity to develop reflective practice skills while in this space was an important factor for dealing with threshold concepts and led to transformative learning. Active participation is the vehicle through which these two concepts can be experienced. Navigation is an underpinning requirement, but of particular consequence in this case study was that the experienced participant presence highlighted some of the difficulties the novices were experiencing and triggers for active participation. More could have been made of experienced expertise to support and orientate registrants new to the MOOC experience.

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Appendix: Themes Emerging from the Analysis of the Various Data Sources

Course evaluation questionnaire
Overwhelming vs. well organized

Professional values/course identitySensemaking of MOOC learning experienceReflection/reflective practiceThreshold concepts/transformative momentsMaking sense of MOOC communitySurvey focused on participation
Differential views on participationPerceived lack of prerequisite skills

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