The design of all scripts in this MOOC was guided by KCI, following the previous iteration of the pre-service course. Examining the enactment in the previous section was helpful affirmation that the various scripts designed were implemented with some level of fidelity to their design. Here, I discuss how we satisfied the four KCI design principles.
5.4.1 Principle 1
Students work collectively as a knowledge community, creating a knowledge base that is indexed to a specific content domain.
Students collaborated within their SIGs and design groups to co-create a knowledge base supported by scripted activities and scaffolds, and indexed to the weekly themes and learning objectives. Instead of pushing all of the created artefacts into a wiki, like we did in the Pre- Service Course, the knowledge base in our MOOC was more tacit and revealed to users as needed. The large number of learners necessitated a more complex structure of knowledge spaces. We custom-built interfaces that supported interactions with the knowledge artefacts and
exploring the knowledge base in new ways—i.e., semantic tags, voting, adding comments, and embedding the resource tag explorer in the Collaborative workbench. In the Design groups, persistent chats and Etherpads were private to the group, and specifically meant as spaces for rapid prototyping of ideas, whereas the wiki pages were public to the entire SIG, and a space for the group to showcase the current stage of their design process, to receive constructive peer feedback (itself a public knowledge artefact).
The Lesson designs were large, coherent documents, structured with explicit indexing to the weekly themes (i.e., which were themselves the index of the community knowledge base) and completed through an increasingly sophisticated spiral of student learning and pedagogical thinking. This contrasts with the collection of discrete “atoms” in the resource collection, which were individually simple elements, but could be reorganized, structured and explored in multiple ways, due to the amount of metadata attached.
5.4.2 Principle 2
The knowledge base is accessible for use as a resource as well as for editing and improvement by all members.
The MOOC built on artefacts that were generated during prior enactments of the course (i.e., when it was a pre-service university course, but students were still designing lessons and
contributing resources). The current generation of students continued to build on this knowledge base, using the same index, contributing successful lesson designs, adding, tagging and
organizing technology and inquiry resources. These, in turn, will be made available to future course generations, and the wider public. This supported our goal of giving the students a strong sense of working in a knowledge-creating community, where ideas and artefacts generated were consequential to the learning of their peers, to their own subsequent inquiry, and to the growth of the community.
The dialogue between the Design strand and the Foundation strand members was an important backbone of our design. Brainstormed resources and ideas helped kickstart the Design work, and the design process was then supported through a weekly back-and-forth. In-progress designs were made available to the Foundation strand students, and their constructive feedback,
structured around the weekly theme was aggregated and fed back to the Design groups. This made both groups feel responsible for contributing to the shared knowledge base.
5.4.3 Principle 3
Collaborative inquiry activities are designed to address the targeted domain learning goals, using the knowledge base as a primary resource and producing assessable outcomes.
The Collaborative Workbench functioned as a structured environment in which students participating in the design strand were scaffolded in the design of a lesson plan throughout the length of the course. Each week, the design task was structured through three different prompts. The welcome message in the first “tab” provided a high level overview of the week’s activity, whereas the Etherpad prompts provided specific targets for discussion and co-creation. Finally, new headlines were added as scaffolds to the lesson design on the Confluence wiki, which would serve to guide the ideas added by the team to their lessons. In addition to the prompts and
instructions, The Collaborative Workbench also provided an aggregated view of constructive feedback provided by peers from the Foundation track, structured around the weekly theme. For example in Week 3: Collaborative Learning, students were asked to provide feedback about:
• How is this lesson incorporating collaboration? If it is not, can you help think of any ways the designers could add collaboration?
• How could collaboration help improve students’ learning in this lesson?
• What should the designers keep in mind, as they think about weaving collaboration into their lesson? Will it take more time, or add possible confusions for students? In this way, the script ensured that all students were focused directly on the specific learning goals of the course, organized by weekly theme, and that the knowledge base (in the example above, the lesson designs) served as a primary resource.
5.4.4 Principle 4
The teacher's role must be clearly specified within the inquiry script, in addition to a general orchestrational responsibility.
Given the large number of students, and the fully-online nature of the course, the teacher’s role is of great interest, especially given students’ need to feel that they are being attended to within the
MOOC (i.e., that some instructor is seeing the comments they make in the discussions, or their lesson designs). One approach to providing a sense of instructor presence was the weekly “welcome” videos, which were recorded during the course, and reflected upon the progress of the community in real time, distinguishing themselves from the pre-recorded “documentary- style” videos through their more informal approach. These videos were prepared by Professor Slotta in extemporaneous form, and typically involved screen casting where he showed examples of student ideas, read comments allowed, and tried to synthesize what had happened in the previous week, and how it would be relevant to the coming week’s theme.
Both the primary instructors (Professor Slotta and Dr. Evans from UTS), and the wider
instructional team were active participants in the discussion forums, answering student questions and highlighting interesting comments. We made sure that at least one member of the
instructional team was assigned to each of the Special Interest Groups, with particular
responsibility to shepherd the group discussions and support the Design groups in that SIG. To support this role, we created a Learning Analytics Dashboard, which let instructional staff see, at-a-glance, the progress of different Design groups, with quick links into the Collaborative workbench of various groups, to support their knowledge creation and design process. Finally, a key role of the instructors in such a large and complex course was to continually monitor the development of the course community, and to modify the design of the scripts and technological components (e.g., the prompts and scaffolds) to better support student learning. Examples of adjustments that were carried out during the course include the combination of SIGs to arrive at a smaller number of SIGs, each with a critical mass of students to support lively discussions and collaborations, as well as many small design revisions to the Collaboration workbench, and adding the communication channels available to Design groups, to support their coordination and collaborative work.
Hence, the MOOC design team was quite deliberative about the teacher’s role, in order to address this principle, and our decisions made a clear impact on the quality of the course. This is clearly a topic for further work and investigation in future online learning designs, and there are several interesting questions that could yet be addressed from the data collected in this MOOC (e.g., looking for differences in how the various instructors interacted with each SIG, and whether that resulted in any important variations in how the SIGs progressed).