ScHARR MOOC Diaries - Part XVI: Catering for diversity

Part XVI: Catering for diversity

For this week's blog, we wanted to share with you what has been arguably the most challenging aspect of building course materials for our Sustainable Healthy Diets MOOC: catering to and engaging such a diverse range of learners.

Of the three MOOCs we had offered here at the University of Sheffield, the ‘Sustainable Healthy Diets’ MOOC  attracted the most diverse audience, from sixth formers, to retired people and others never having studied at University level, as well as participants who were educated to Masters and PhD level, (with some already having specialist knowledge in the field)  whilst others who had signed up from India were not very confident in communicating in English.  As a consequence we designed material to try to pitch the level at one that was accessible to all.

In order to do this,  we decided to use a social constructivist approach to learning because of the nature / heterogeneity of those participating in the healthy sustainable diets MOOC (which was the philosophy behind the first MOOCs developed). The idea was to shift the focus from the formal academic content to a collaborative learning approach, where participants with greater knowledge and understanding could help those at an earlier stage in their learning to construct their knowledge and critical reflection.

The learning materials we selected reflected this - rather than focusing only on academic sources which may have alienated those participants not used to reading academic papers through the use of complex language and the scientific terminology, we chose to also include non scientific materials, such as newspaper articles. These were utilised more as prompts to facilitate participant discussion as opposed to as reliable sources of information.

Therefore some participants who may have been expecting more of a didactic style pedagogy, (which some of the more recent MOOCs in the USA have used) could have been disappointed with this approach, however we have had a great deal of positive feedback regarding the range of learning materials included and more importantly regarding the participatory and collaborative style of learning.

What is really encouraging to us as hosts, is the time that those who are more educated or knowledgeable in this subject area have been prepared to give in order to contribute to the discussions and further the debate and research agenda. This really captures the essence of a MOOC in widening participation, raising aspirations and communicating essential information to our citizens around the globe.

Weekly Webinars!

Week 2 webinar in full swing!

One of the most exciting aspects of our participation has been our weekly live webinars; not all institutions offering MOOCs have access to a synchronous webinar tool such as Blackboard Collaborate.

Fortunately within the School of Health and Related Research we do have this tool. We have invested in this primarily for use in enhancing the delivery of our post-graduate distance learning programmes such as the Master of Public Health (distance learning).

You can watch last week's lively webinar session below...



Luke and Angie

ScHARR MOOC Diaries - Part XIV: Sustainable Healthy Diets - induction week review

Part XIV: Sustainable Healthy Diets - induction week review

The Sustainable Healthy Diets MOOC begins

'Mission Control Centre' By NASACjosefy at en.wikipedia

It was 9am on the 17th June. The MOOC team were assembled at ScHARR MOOC headquarters, (aka Regent Court!), holding their breaths, and anxiously waiting to press the magic button which would kick start the most exciting adventure in learning that any of them had probably ever had!The hour was upon them, and Luke took up the mantle as chief button pusher. 5,4,3,2,1 and ping, we were live! Ok, so who are we kidding. It was all programmed to automatically release at 9am. The wait was, nonetheless, palpable.


The morning progressed, with a steady flow of participants arriving. By lunchtime, the discussion forums were bustling with people introducing themselves and in some cases reading and replying to each other. The cross-pollination was already in full swing. There was a loud cheer when our first video post came in. A magical moment for everyone I think - like a second moon landing really.

It was clear from the beginning that we’d chosen a subject here which was very popular and on which there was no shortage of opinions, hopes and ideas. A "we want to make the world a better place" mentality was emerging as people described what they felt a sustainable diet was and how it might be achieved.

So, can we save the world?

Well, not single handedly, but with a group of enthusiastic participants like the ones we have on this MOOC, we can certainly give it damn good go! From some of the introduction posts we read it was clear that there was significant diversity amongst our participants in terms of backgrounds and knowledge bases. We have been joined by academics with specialist knowledge relating to key sustainability issues and working on current projects exploring sustainability in different areas relating to food; we also have a number of grass roots project participants, with a wealth of experience in engaging with people in local communities on food issues. Combined with this, there a number of you who are taking the course for professional and personal reasons, and this is wonderful!

And now for the week in numbers...

During this first week, the MOOC received 468 discussion board posts (with the anticipation that with the weekend still to come, this may rise significantly before week 1 starts). These posts were mainly based around the introduction activity whereby MOOCsters were invited to introduce themselves, explain what they felt a “sustainable diet” meant to them and to read and respond to any of their peers’ posts.

We also received 146 unique blog posts in the MOOCsters blog groups (which were limited to approximately 50-55 members in each). These included some exciting video blog posts which we’re keen to encourage people to do over this 5 week course.

Finally, we received a large amount of tweets using the #dietsmooc hashtag. For this induction week, these tweets were again mainly people announcing their arrival via social media but also some tweeters giving early indications of what they thought about the course so far or their hopes for the coming weeks.

How are our MOOCsters interacting with the MOOC so far?

Coursesites' reporting tool is great for quickly spitting out some really useful data on course access. As expected, the majority of activity (58.2% ) in the first week has focussed on the course-wide discussion board. There was also a fair amount of activity on the content (18.9%) and then the group blogs (18.9%)

Which tools are being used?

We've also been able to see a break-down of when the participants are logging on to access our MOOC. As we can see below, the majority of access happens between 8am and 9pm British Standard Time.

When are MOOCsters accessing the course?

So far, so good then?

To sum up, we are thrilled with how our introductory week has gone, but if we said we weren't still holding our breath on a number of fronts we would be telling fibs! Will the technology continue to support us and our participants for the duration of the course? Can we keep such a diverse mix of MOOCsters interested and engaged till the end? How will our live discussion webinars go? The answer may be blowing in the wind, but if you tune in for our next post, we're hoping to have caught it and be in a position to share it with you.......

Angie Clonan and Luke Miller

ScHARR MOOC Diaries - Part XIII: Build it and they will come

Build it and they will come...

So, we designed some MOOCs and we marketed them as best we could without the marketing might of platforms such as Coursera. And they did indeed come. But who exactly were 'they'?

Today the first of the ScHARR MOOCs, the Sustainable Healthy Diets MOOC launched and we thought it was about time that we shared some information about who has actually signed for this exciting new journey!

How many?

First of all, numbers. How many did we recruit? Well, approximately 1400 people registered an interest in the Sustainable Healthy Diets MOOC. Of these (at the time of launch this morning) approximately 1000 had fully registered for the course (using the coursesites platform). The discrepancy between these numbers could be due to a number of reasons including:

• an inability to complete the registration process (technical problems perhaps?)
• a change of mind (some participants did contact us to say they would like to drop out or defer due to holidays and so on)
• there is a possibility that the invitations they received were lost (emails can sometimes be marked as spam and removed from users' inboxes)

The fact is without actually surveying people we will never be able to accurately account for this loss of numbers.

When did they sign up?

So, for those that did successfully register, who signed up and when?

The graph below gives an indication of when people were signing up. Notice that there were definitely more signups as the course start date grew nearer. For the Sustainable Healthy Diets course we were averaging 50+ signups per day towards the end.

Signups from Feb - June 2013

Where are they coming from?

After signing up, participants (or MOOCsters as they've affectionately become known within the ScHARR MOOCs team!) were asked to complete an optional online survey gathering some basic demographic data. We received 584 responses for the Sustainable Healthy Diets MOOC.

We asked for:

• Which continent are you from?
• Which country are you form?
• Age?
• Gender?
• How did you hear about us?
• Why did you enrol on this course?

Interestingly. among other things, the results showed a distinct and unexpected gender divide. This may be a reflection of interest in this particular area?

Male: 144, Female:440

We also found that we had managed to recruit from over 61 countries worldwide

Participants 'attending' from over 61 countries

In terms of age, the participants were predominantly young. Could this be related to the fact that this course is online and younger 'digital natives' may be attracted to (or less hesitant about) this mode of delivery?

Spread of ages

How can we keep them?

We know from existing data that MOOCs by their very nature can suffer from a low participation and high drop-out rate. One of our main objectives is to keep participants interested and engaged the whole way through the 5 week course. We're using a range of participative teaching methods to foster and nurture online collaboration and networking. Our weekly live sessions aim to provide participants with unique opportunities to interact with the tutors, subject experts and each other. So whether or not we can keep them, time will tell!

Luke Miller

The ScHARR MOOCS Diaries: Part X - The cost of developing a MOOC

The cost of developing a MOOC

So by now, we have got the idea that MOOCs are (usually) free for students. But what about the costs of developing them? How much does it cost to create a MOOC? And what benefits (financial and otherwise) do they bring to ScHARR?

By Isabelle Grosjean ZA (Self-published work by ZA)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki
/File%3AMontreGousset001.jpg

The most obvious cost to ScHARR is the amount of staff time that is being devoted to the MOOCs. But what counts as MOOC development time? Some things are obvious- time spent in planning meetings, time spent scripting, setting up and recording audio and video resources for the MOOCs. Other activities are more debatable- if I spend a bus journey to work looking for MOOC-related tweets, and retweeting interesting ones, should this be included in calculations? What about time spent by staff actually studying on other MOOCs? Time spent chatting about MOOCs with University colleagues here in Sheffield? Time spent writing “ScHARR MOOC Diary” blog postings...?

We asked staff members to decide what activities should and should not be included, accepting that the final figures may end up being approximations rather than accurate measurements of time. We then needed a simple process for recording these hours. Rather than recording time on separate activities, we invited staff to keep a note, on a weekly basis, of time spent on “any activity which contributes directly to the development of our 3 MOOCs”. In addition, we made the decision not to keep the 3 MOOCs separate, because so much of the development work has involved all 3 courses, or has been done as one larger group of staff. To make this an open and collaborative process, we set up a google form, with data shared amongst all the MOOC staff- hopefully no-one has felt threatened by sharing details of their input in this way. When it became apparent that it was difficult for all staff to keep the google form up to date, we decided that at our fortnightly MOOC meetings, an iPad would be passed around at the start so people could update their figures then if needed.

Interim figures are shown below- names have been anonymised, although you can see, bottom left, a highlighted table with the contributions thus far of different staff groups. Whilst we would currently treat these figures with some caution (and after this blog is published, I imagine there might be some retrospective updating of the numbers!), the data so far collected suggests that it is the two members of staff leading the forthcoming MOOCs (“Healthy sustainable diets” and “Health Inequalities”) who have put in the most work so far (around 30% each of total number of hours recorded).

Logging the hours

In due course, we will be able to put some figures against the recorded hours, based on staff salaries, and to arrive at an overall figure for developing and running our 3 MOOCs. How closely this corresponds with other estimates remains to be seen. The University of Edinburgh’s MOOCs, run in early 2013 via Coursera, cost an estimated £30,000 from development to delivery whilst  the University of Pennsylvania’s MOOC courses (also developed on behalf of Coursera) cost $50,000 each to develop.

There is plenty of ongoing discussion about the costs and benefits of running MOOCs, and much speculation about different models for monetization. At ScHARR, we will only be able to make an informed comment on these issues once the first courses are complete, and we’ve had a chance to estimate how many MOOC participants converted to postgraduate study at ScHARR, and what value the other benefits- such as the networking opportunities for ScHARR and the impact on our reputation- might have. Nevertheless, we are quietly confident that the investment we are now making will bear financial and educational dividends, for students, staff and ScHARR.

Sign up for the ScHARR MOOCs here.

By Chris Blackmore

The ScHARRMOOC Diaries part VI - Managing participant enrolment

The ScHARRMOOC Diaries part VI - Managing participant enrolment

Since we allowed participants to start registering on our ScHARR MOOCs on the 8th Feb 2013 we have had a steady stream of sign-ups (with occasional ‘surges’). At the time of writing this latest ScHARR MOOC Diary entry we currently have over 480 registered ‘MOOCsters’.

But how exactly are we managing this process? How are we ensuring that this doesn't incur an unmanageable administrative load?

Well, let’s start by looking at the process we have in place for accepting registrations.

The sign-up process 

The process we were going to use had to be nailed down before we made anything available - changing once students started signing up would have been a disaster. We had 3 options for the entry to our MOOCs:

1. completely open, no signup - like a public-facing website that has scheduled activities. This would have made analysing the users of the course further down the line problematic not to mention any moderating.
2. self enrolment, semi-open - the course available to view but with everything but the homepage hidden. They can only see as much of the course as we want them to see at the moment, so we can still turn on some of the tools and make them available before the start and we have a natural place in the homepage to post or link to additional information.
3. it could be self enrolled with the everything hidden - this is what most MOOCs I have seen so far have done, with just a separate webpage outlining the course. Keeping as much information as possible inside the course made most sense.

We went for option 2. The process is outlined in the slide below...





As it mentions students can ask questions before or upon signing up - we have an account (scharrmoocs@sheffield.ac.uk) set up for handling enquiries and set aside time to check incoming mails generated by the sign up process for questions about the courses. This initially was handled by Luke but once the volume increased (we’ve had over 100 in a day) some admin help from Jess and Jon (thanks!) was arranged. We have created a MOOC FAQs page, based on the kinds of enquiries we are receiving from would-be participants, to help minimise the admin load.

Who is signing up?

So, whilst coursesites enables us to process our participants in a fairly automated way, we do still have some manual admin tasks that require regular attention.  For starters, we wanted to keep an up-to-date record of who was signing up to which MOOC and when. We are gathering this information by capturing registration request numbers in a google spreadsheet which is updated (manually) daily.

We also wanted to record some basic demographic information about who was actually signing up. More specifically, for each signup, we were interested in the following information:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• How they heard about us
• Why they are doing it

This information is gathered using a google form and for each MOOC we can start to get a picture of where (globally) our participants are coming from

We were also keen to monitor the amount of resource which was being invested internally in terms of staff hours (broken into different roles such as ‘academic’, ‘admin’ and ‘learning technologists’). This would ultimately help inform our ScHARR MOOC evaluations and help with decisions about the viability of running future MOOCS. 

Finally we’ve also embedded google analytics into several pages that lead into the MOOCs - more about those in another post once we have more information from them.

For more information or to sign up go to our ScHARR MOOCs registration page.

Luke and Dan

The ScHARR MOOC Diaries: Part V - The birth of the Sustainable Healthy Diets MOOC

The birth of the Sustainable Healthy Diets MOOC 

Picture the scene: ScHARR common room, on a cold and wet autumnal day in 2012, Michelle
Holdsworth and myself deep in dual brainstorming mode; our conundrum was unique: how could
we reach a wider audience with the essential information on diets which were both healthy and
sustainable? Colleagues at Universities and NGO’s all over the UK and Europe were conducting
exciting research, highlighting new findings every week, but these were mainly being published in
scientific journals, never to be read by ordinary folk. It would take ages, literally years for this info to
be written into policy (if anyone at No. 10 was ever interested!) and even longer for the public to be
able to make changes to their eating habits…….

By KMJ [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Then, a light bulb moment – “I know” said Michelle, rather excitedly, “we should do a MOOC on a
healthy and sustainable diet!”

“Excuse me?” I answered, a little confused to say the least, thinking I must have misheard or maybe
Michelle was referring to some scientific term that I had not yet come across.

“Yes a MOOC – these new types of courses, stands for ‘Massively Open Online Course’. They have
been done by a few of the American Universities.” Michelle explained a bit more to me and it soon
became apparent that we would at least have to give this a try: it was too good an opportunity to
miss out on.

A few months later and we are about to convene our first MOOC group meeting. Although I am
really excited about getting started, I am also very nervous on a number of fronts!

Firstly, the technological learning curve is going to be very steep for me: reassuringly I am
surrounded by experts, so I’m hoping this should ease the climb!

Secondly, I am concerned about including ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING that needs to be said on
healthy and sustainable diets, as I know the academics and NGO professionals working in this field
are passionate and will not be all that forgiving of any errors or omissions! Therefore I am going to
try to showcase as much of this fantastic work as I can fit, within learning objectives, to ensure that
this doesn’t happen. This should make for some lively debate! Although we will be covering some of
the basics, which may be ‘old hat’ to some, it should be possible to include cutting edge projects and
research too.

Finally, I am hoping to have real engagement from my fellow MOOCsters: that’s any and all who sign
up to take part in the course. Previous MOOC’s have shown a number of ‘lurkers’, and I would like
this MOOC to be engaging and stimulating in order to generate some meaningful output that can be
used for the future, in particular thinking about how we can communicate this information to even
wider audiences!

Please be encouraged to sign up and take part, I promise it will be fun! If you wish to contribute to
any of the content or tell us about what is healthy and sustainable for you, then I would love to hear
from you. Angie.clonan@sheffield.ac.uk

(Posted on behalf of Angie Clonan)