Small to big before massive

Dan Hickey, Kelly, Shen

Scaling teaching online up to “big” open online course. Plans to teach course again this summer. Wants people to mention BOOC as an alternative to xMOOCs, don't want Georgia Tech meltdown.

Alternatives (DCCC, mentors etc) are great, but… Project-based courses require so massive amount of work. People with enough TPACK are just not going to do it. Crowd-sourced: won't work with a large body of disciplinary knowledge.

Method to foster large amount of participation with a large body of disciplinary knowledge.

Participary assessment design research

Participatory learning and assessment design principles

  • let contexts give meaning to knowledge tools
    • contextualizing disciplinary knowledge
      • when you register: what's your discipline, what's your role
      • use to form networking groups (460 people, 17 groups)
      • personalized learning contexts
      • curricular aim and introduction (scared off some people)
      • part of first assignment, reiterate context; aim, role, domain
    • secondary, emergent groups - project identity into space
  • reward disciplinary engagement
  • grade

Wikifolio: public course artifacts

  • everything in class is public
  • few discussion forums, all discussion on artefacts
  • generate a lot of writing - 1500 words per week
    • dense, disciplinary writing
    • people who eventually dropped out wrote almost as much as the people who ultimately finished

Rank relative relevance

  • evaluating instruction - what's more relevant?
  • what are things that make evaluation insensitive to instruction - connect concept to their own context

Access personalized content

  • share external resources

All features are refined in small intimate, intuitive context, and then automated, so we can run in a team

Disciplinary engagement

Randi Engle: Productive disciplinary engagement

Peer commenting and discussion: Post one question at the bottom of wikifolio each week.

Peer endorsement and promotion

  • Peer assessment never works, but peer endorsement works well
  • Peer promotion: endorse 3 classmates each week. Promote only one each week as exemplary (with reasons)

37% completion rate.

Public individualized feedback

  • give detailed feedback to early posters (tend to be the best students) - ask others to look at that feedback

Assess understanding prudently

Web enabled digital badges - worked really well. Contain claim and evidence. Links directly to the work they did.

Toolbox