So far, we've discussed in our blogs our journey in designing and developing the various aspects that make MOOCs successful in providing participants with a self-paced learning experience on a global scale.
We shared with you the experience we gained from creating content, such as videos that allowed participants to relate to experts working in their profession to tutorials that supported participants in their learning and reduced the technical challenges they faced in online learning.
In addition, we discussed the ways we were able to establish online learning communities where participants shared their experience, learned from others, and developed their critical thinking skills by reflecting on their own practices and knowledge. We tried as much as possible to present MOOCs as a resource that can shed light on crises such as communities’ access to sustainable energy in Lebanon, and we highlighted potential responses by providing real-life case studies from the community.
Picture 1. Screenshot taken of a step from Sustainable Energy Access for Communities MOOC Step 1.9 The promise of renewable energy for Lebanon
Our journey now has reached another stage, a stage where we are reflecting on the work that we have done for the last few years. Our goal is not only to reflect on our experience from working on MOOCs; we want to reflect on the participants’ experiences as well, to see what type of impact the MOOCs had on them.
For that reason, we started archiving data retrieved from MOOCs all the way from our very first MOOC "Community Based Research: Getting Started". We did this by collecting data from the platforms (Edraak and FutureLearn) and designing pre/during/post surveys that are included in the MOOCs, in addition to conducting interviews with participants. This was not an easy task with everything that was going on, from keeping an eye on the MOOCs to making sure that everything was going smoothly and that participants’ needs were met.
Several research projects are currently being conducted by the education team at the RELIEF Center. Some of them have been submitted and are in review.
The first one is an investigation of the “Co-Design” Theory of Change that guided the design-based research that created the five MOOCs. It investigates the impact of the co-design of MOOCs with stakeholders by drawing data from participants’ engagement in the MOOC and the impact survey that was shared with the participants in the course.
The second one is a paper that proposes a new term for the MOOCs we have created: CoMOOCs - that is, co-designed, collaborative MOOCs. The CoMOOC model can be considered as a collaborative platform that allows professionals to build and share knowledge together - for example, teachers of refugees and other vulnerable children can build an online community where they can exchange and generate new knowledge.
A third study is a collaboration with MAPS. The paper describes how researchers from MAPS created a hybrid course using the Community Based Research MOOC and offered it to their students in their higher education program. This provided an innovative approach to teaching higher education students in the contexts of mass displacement.
What is the value of participating in a MOOC?
Another paper is based on interviews with participants and survey responses that were conducted with the Transforming Education in Challenging Environments MOOC. The goal was to see how this MOOC created value for participants - immediate, potential, applied, realized, and reframing. These five values form the Value Creation Framework that aims to make sense of the different knowledge that participants gain and put into practice within a specific community and study its impact on this community. In addition to how social learning in networks makes a difference on different levels and impacts different stakeholders.
In MOOCs, social interactions are essential for participants’ learning. Immediate value helps learners to recognize whether the knowledge they gained from their colleagues had an immediate effect on them. This value can be found in discussion forums, Padlet activities, or even from the experts' videos. Social interaction can allow participants to find solutions to their challenges, learn from others, or simply share success stories that others can relate to.
Picture 2. Screenshot taken of a step from Transforming Education in Challenging Environments MOOC Step 3.2 Changing our practice to meet students’ aspirations
Potential Value is like a knowledge reservoir. Not all knowledge can be used immediately. Some knowledge requires the participants’ time to reflect on and decide whether it is useful for them in order to use it in the future. For example, we made certain that the MOOCs we designed included input from experts in various fields, including but not only academics. For instance, in the Sustainable Energy Access for Communities MOOC, we added video case studies of the experiences of staff working in a company that installs solar panels, communities with no previous experience in renewable energy that installed grids in their neighborhood; professors studying this field; and we even included the experiences of families from different parts of the world suffering from similar challenges. We could see from the quiz responses and the comments that participants understood and valued these insights, but we also wanted to know if they were also able to go further than that and demonstrate Applied Value.
Applied Value focuses mainly on participants’ practices. It can be seen as taking the Potential Value and making changes to it, allowing participants to tailor it in a way that fits their context. And this is something that we encouraged participants to do in the MOOCs. We made sure to tell them that not every context is the same, and that a solution that has worked with an expert that shared his experience in the course does not mean it will work in your context. Several activities were designed in a way that encouraged participants to bring to the course a specific challenge and try to figure it out through what they had gained in the course.
And here comes the importance of the Realized Value that helps participants identify whether their new practices have been successful or not by reflecting on it. The post-MOOC interviews enabled us to demonstrate the participants’ Realized Value as they showed us whether the content or the design of the courses were able to benefit participants in their work.
Since the Transforming Education in Challenging Environments MOOC ended we have kept in contact with participants to see what they have done with what they learnt. We added Step 1.10 How teachers are using this MOOC presenting two of these participants. Mariam and Léa were able to put into practice the knowledge that they gained from this course in order to benefit the learning community that they are in. For example, Mariam said that the MOOC helped her recognize the challenges that teachers face with students in the context of displacement. This knowledge helped her reach out to them more effectively by sharing new approaches with teachers working in vulnerable situations. And this had a very positive impact on her work.
And finally, the Reframing Value is where participants take their practices to a higher level and reframe their entire approach! For example, sharing the knowledge they learnt with their colleagues, communities and institutions and developing new directions as a result. And it is our goal to pave the way for participants to take risks and even redefine success as a result of changing objectives, strategies, or ways of thinking.
Stay tuned! We will be sharing our latest published paper soon!
Over to you!
Research papers and blogs are two of the ways that are allowing us to share ours and the participants’ experiences in MOOCs. In your opinion, what other means can be used to share these lessons learnt in order to reach a larger number of people?
Find out more about this topic:
Sustainable Energy Access for Communities MOOC
Community Based Research: Getting Started MOOC