The co-design team consisted of the course instructor, Dr. Jim Slotta, who is also my PhD
supervisor, and myself. I joined Dr. Slotta as a co-designer, and we met weekly for six months in fall 2013, preceding the launch of the first revised course in January 2014. We focused on a principle-based design process, based on the Knowledge Community Inquiry framework, and
also considered both thematically appropriate contents, and technological solutions that would let us continue to implement the valuable aspects of the existing course, with a much larger student population.
While the course ran, I acted as a course teaching assistant, and we continued meeting once or twice weekly to revise the course design, and reflect on how the course was unfolding. Over the summer of 2014, we met regularly to discuss refining the course offering, and we then together offered the course again in September 2014.
During the two course sessions, we regularly invited other graduate students and recent graduates to assist us in the course, and we also discussed and received feedback on the course design and implementation at our weekly lab group meetings.
3.3.3 Participants
The students in the course were teacher candidates who followed a one-year Bachelor of Education program, divided into Primary/Junior, Junior/Intermediate and Intermediate/Senior strands. Both the Winter 2014 and Fall 2014 course offerings had 74 students, all of whom were Bachelor of Education (B. Ed.) students. To be accepted to the Bachelor of Education program, the students would have had to first complete a four-year Bachelor program or the equivalent. The B. Ed. program is one-year long, and includes general pedagogical and psychological theory, subject specific methodology, two practicum placements, and a related studies course. Students also have one interest-based elective, for which our course served as an option, for any students who wanted to learn more about the use of technology and inquiry in their teaching practice.
One of the challenges with designing the course was that our students varied in terms of the age level and topics of their teaching interests, ranging from kindergarten to high school, and from arts to science to automotive technologies. The two student cohorts (Spring and Fall) were roughly similar, but one difference was where, in their program, the course occurred. Since the program begins in the Fall, those students who took our initial offering in the Winter term were in their second semester, and thus had completed a number of courses, including lesson design and pedagogical theory, in the previous term, as well as a 5-week practicum experience. Hence, they were closer to the completion of the program, which also carried attendant concerns about
finding jobs. Those who took the course in our second offering, in Fall, 2014, were just starting their program, had fresh perspectives but less experience with topics of pedagogy and practice. The specific design of the course will be presented in Chapter 4, including all materials and activities, and a detailed description of the scripting and orchestration.
3.4 MOOC
3.4.1 Research Context
EdX is an online learning platform that has grown to be one of the most popular for Massive Open Online Courses. Anyone can sign up to participate in courses, with no pre-requisites for participation. Most courses are free of cost, but some courses (including the one in this study) offer the option of receiving a verified certificate, which essentially confirms that a person has performed the minimum requirements to pass the course. Courses are offered through the EdX website, an instantiation of the open-source OpenEdX software. Once enrolled in a course, the EdX software presents a sequences of activities, typically grouped as weekly themes, with a focus on videos, text and quizzes. There is also a possibility of integrating external tools, which we used in our study to design a more complex sequence of activities, based on a persistent student model.
In 2015, we designed and enacted the MOOC “Teaching With Technology and Inquiry: An Open Course For Teachers” (INQ101x), specifically marketed as a professional development experience for current in-service teachers. The course ran for six weeks in July and August 2015, and also featured several weeks of pre-course activities for early registrations. The course themes and pedagogical design were based on the OISE pre-service course described above, but heavily modified to fit the MOOC format and needs of MOOC learners.
The design and enactment of this course were seen from the outset as part of our design-based research, extending our understanding of how to scale a KCI course. Our strategy was to directly map the design of the pre-service course onto our design of an in-service professional
development course. In essence, it would be the same course, but extended to a different context, accommodating in-service teachers instead of pre-service teachers, and responding to the unique affordances of online learning and of MOOCs in particular. The specific design of MOOC activities and materials will be presented and analyzed in Chapter 5.
3.4.2 Co-Design Team
This MOOC was a collaboration between Professor Slotta’s research group at OISE, and administration and teachers from the University of Toronto Schools (UTS), a high school affiliated with the University of Toronto, led by school Principal, Dr. Rosemary Evans. Drs. Slotta and Evans were billed as co-instructors of the course in our promotional materials, with the aim of establishing a dual perspective of research and practice. A number of graduate students and affiliated researchers contributed to the design of materials, particularly the videos (i.e., writing scripts, recording, and editing), the visual design of the various Web pages, and the advertising elements.
While a dozen or so researchers, teachers, and administrators from OISE and UTS were part of the high-level discussions and framing of the course, the detailed design of the pedagogical scripts, including reflection and discussion prompts, and technological scaffolds were the topic of this study, and hence a continuation of the design-based research in the previous iteration (i.e., the pre-service course described above, and detailed in Chapter 4).
Following the design of the pre-service course, our intent was to add a layer of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) within the MOOC, allowing a reduction in size and increase in focus for any student’s cohort (i.e., for online discussions and other inquiry activities). To support the SIGs, we invited various members from our design team and wider community who had expertise within certain disciplines (e.g., arts, history and humanities, math and science) to serve as participant instructors, with the aim of ensuring that each SIG had active instructor who was oriented specifically to that SIG.
The co-design team met regularly for six months before the course began, and several times per week during the running of the course. For the month preceding the launch of the MOOC, and during the MOOC itself, I was living in a small Chinese village, but remained in close contact, and even developed substantive content and functionality from abroad. My living in China was not a factor in my ability to participate in the design or enactment of the MOOC, which is itself a remarkable testimony to the present state of internet technology capabilities, as well as the EdX platform. The technology platform is discussed at some length in Chapter 5.
3.4.3 Students
The EdX platform that hosted the course is a highly trafficked website, which actively promotes new courses to a wide community of potential participant based on their previous interests. However, we consciously wanted to reach beyond “habitual MOOC-students” to target specifically in-service teachers, most of whom had probably never taken a MOOC before. We therefore actively marketed the course through social networks and mailing lists that directly target teachers. MOOC students come from around the world, and our MOOC had students register from 169 different countries, with the most frequent countries being the US, Brazil, India and Canada. Students’ median age was 34, and 50% of students had a Masters or PhD.
In total, 7.995 students added the course before the final course deadline, of which 118 paid for the verified certificate option. However, only the students who completed the interactive
registration, and accessed some of the interactive components, will be analyzed in this study. By the first course deadline, 1,319 students had registered in the interactive system, ultimately growing to 1,755 students by the final course deadline.