By Leah Marks. University Teacher, Medical Genetics
As I looked at the calendar earlier this week, I knew the date felt vaguely familiar but couldn’t quite place it. Suddenly it dawned on me why the 19th May was engraved on my memory – it was that day last year that Glasgow’s first MOOC ‘Cancer in the 21st Century’ went live. The previous year had passed in a flurry of design, planning, writing, recording, editing and proof reading and the 6 week MOOC itself was very much an ‘all hands of deck approach’ which I found both exhausting and exhilarating.
Add in the obligatory report writing (http://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_395337_en.pdf) that accompanies any academic endeavour and here we are, about to begin again! This has come about because, in addition to the University developing a series of new MOOCs, our course has been given the go-ahead to run again. The 17th August will see round two of the course, followed by another run in January 2016.
Since students often accuse us as educators of being obsessed with feedback and reflection, I thought I ought to apply the principle to myself. With the benefit of hindsight and the passing of the months I feel able to objectively look at the MOOC and ask myself that dreaded interview question; ‘What would you do differently next time’? I think the main answer for me is that this time I won’t be so worried about what the students learn.
Since teaching and learning are generally considered our main objective, this may sound slightly bizarre so let me expand a little. Content, content and content felt like my focus for the MOOC first time round; had we covered every aspect of cell biology, did the students understand which symbols in a family tree represented males and females, was the mechanism of drug action explained sufficiently….? As scientists, we can too often be overcome by a preoccupation with detail and forget the big picture and I certainly did. Was the strand of DNA on slide 4 a little too big for the nucleus, was the angle of the radiotherapy beam on slide 10 accurate? Obviously these details must be considered in the appropriate context, and I’m definitely not suggesting we have a slapdash approach to the design of our teaching materials. But what I am suggesting is that we take a step back from time to time and ask ourselves what the bigger picture is.
For me the ‘big picture’ of the MOOC was summed up in the overwhelming popularity of two specific videos – ‘Getting the most out of Google’ and ‘The patient experience’, neither of which had anything much at all to do with me or with my obsession with DNA! Perhaps this simply means that the students don’t find molecular biology all that interesting and that they prefer more generic content. However I believe there’s more to it than that.
Looking at the range of students we attracted (~7500 registered) the variety of backgrounds they came from was incredible. The ‘why are you here’ comments thread in week 1 was an education in itself and clearly students come to a MOOC with a wide range of previous experience and expectations. How we meet the needs of such a diverse audience is a question which I’m not sure we’ll ever fully answer but watching the interactions on the many discussion threads which wound their way through our course I felt that I gained some insight. They asked questions of each other which suggested that not only were they using the materials we had provided in a traditional sense, but that they were taking them out-with the confines of the immediate context and applying them to a huge range of situations. It suddenly occurred to that the very ability that I continually strive to develop in my ‘on campus’ students was happening with very little effort on my part in this diverse and non-traditional environment. The students themselves chose what they wanted to learn and how they wanted to use that information and for me this was a freeing experience. They were not bound by what I chose for them to learn, they were empowered to choose for themselves.
So the questions arises again as to whether I will be including learning outcomes for each week of the MOOC, I feel that my answer will have to be an emphatic ‘no’. I wish my students to have the power to determine their own path, yes guided by myself and other educators but free to escape beyond the confines of my expectations and, in the process, to have the potential to learn something neither of us had ever conceived.