Guest blogger series: Grahame Bilbow on Coursera Partners Conference 2015

Professor Grahame Bilbow has been Director of the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) since May 2013. Prior to this, he was an Assistant Director of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in the UK, with responsibility for the Arts and Humanities. In recent years, Grahame’s interests have turned to the quest for quality in teaching and learning in higher education internationally.

The Coursera Partners Conference was a great opportunity to learn more about Coursera, their vision and their strategic priorities, and to meet many of their partners.

Specialisations: the answer to the problem of scalability?
A recurrent theme at the Conference was to do with the ‘scalability’ of MOOCs: their capacity to grow in a planned and efficient manner. At the moment, MOOCs tend to spring up in an organic way, and are largely disconnected from each other. In the interests of scalability and future revenue-generation, Coursera are becoming interested in the development of so-called MOOC ‘specialisations’: sequences of interrelated courses that culminate in a capstone project that only course completers are eligible to take.

What do specialisations look like?
Specialisations tend to consist of a number of MOOCs that are shorter than standard individual MOOCs. According to Coursera, nearly half the learners they surveyed expressed a preference for specialisations that consisted of three or four MOOCs, each of four weeks’ duration separated by one or two weeks, leading on to a capstone experience. An example of a specialisation is the Modern Musician specialisation designed by Berklee College of Music in the United States, which consists of three short MOOCs followed by a capstone project.

How do learners react to specialisations?
Coursera’s research suggests that there is a widespread preference among MOOC takers for specialised MOOCs of this type. It appears that the rates of course completion and verified certificate conversion are both higher among takers of specialisations than among takers of individual MOOCs, and this translates into higher revenue. What appears to appeal to learners about specialisations is the fact that the content of MOOCs can be more comprehensive and cohesive and have clearly aligned learning outcomes. This knowledge can then be applied in practice in the capstone – something that also appeals to employers. Specialisations can also involve collaboration across training providers, and this can result in more broad-based learning that appeals to learners and employers alike.

So, what’s in it for us?
Specialisations are of interest to the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) at the University of Hong Kong. The MOOC we are planning in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education could quite easily be broken up into a number of three-four week modules dealing with discrete topics such as instructional design, student learning styles, assessment for learning, and so on, and include a capstone project which would require takers to apply what they have learnt to their own real-world teaching and learning situations. I am optimistic that such a modular specialisation course with integrated capstone would be of interest internationally; however, it might be of particular interest in a regional context, among teachers in higher education in Mainland China and elsewhere in East Asia.

HKU’s second Massive Open Online Course – The Search for Vernacular Architecture of Asia will begin on April 14. Here’s a sneak preview of the first week’s videos. Register to join us and thousands of learners from around the world.

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Learn more: Sneak Preview 2 / Trailer

Guest blogger series: Masato Kajimoto on Coursera Partners Conference 2015

Dr. Masato Kajimoto is an Assistant Professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. Masato specializes in news literacy education, multimedia storytelling, and social media in journalism. His MOOC, “Making Sense of News”, starts on May 19, 2015. Register now.

As an instructor of the upcoming Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) at HKU, my focus to attend this conference was to find out how other university educators around the world have been developing their pedagogical designs specific to the online platform that is totally new to me.

The conference featured more than 25 sessions and covered various aspects of MOOC implementation from institutional strategies to video production workflow. I was particularly intrigued by the engaging teaching approaches adopted by some participating scholars whose instructional methods draw on a number of research in cognitive science, neuroscience, educational psychology, social psychology and other related fields.

I was aware that the concept of MOOC is still in its early stage in the academia and some observers are skeptical about where it is heading but what I didn’t know was the tremendous amount of efforts put into the production of courses at a global scale with many experimental projects and the user analytics data that eloquently tells us about the effectiveness of different teaching and learning approaches.

There are two major takeaways for me from this conference:

First, seemingly subtle changes in the instructional design and video presentation could have a strong impact on users’ learning experience and improve the overall understanding of the subject matter.

Take, Dr. Barbara Oakley, for instance. She is the author of New York Times bestselling science book, A Mind for Numbers, and her MOOC is one of the most popular and successful on-demand courses on Coursera. She demonstrated through a series of workshops how she performs and produces her video clips based on her knowledge in science of learning — the complex connection between neuroscience and social behavior — to minimize learners’ cognitive overload.

For example, she takes an aesthetic decision of how to frame a talking head in the video to a new level of pedagogical decision. According to her, including the hands of a standing instructor (three-quarter shot) has proven to be more effective in the asynchronous online communication than a close-up shot as researches have shown that hand gestures would help learners understand the instruction better.

When she uses graphical elements, they appear just a second earlier before her narration kicks in. In other words, explanation comes shortly after the visual cue is presented. This seems to create a moment of short cognitive challenge inside our head (as we try to figure out what the graphic illustrates), which keeps users engaged in the video.

Professor Richard Mayer, a well-known educational psychology expert who penned such books as Learning and Instruction and Applying the Science of Learning, also shared in his keynote speech a variety of multimedia teaching techniques derived from his research in the science of learning. His presentation focused on how we could effectively reduce students’ extraneous processing of information and solidify understanding of the subject matter in the video-driven, online environment.

His illustration of research findings again reminded that instructors need to pay attention to subtle details. The spacial distance between a graphical element to the text; instructors’ intonation in the voice over; frequent inclusion of the word ‘you’ in the narration, signaling what to focus with gestures (or other cues like highlighting texts); they all significantly affect the learning outcome.

The ‘tricks of the trade’ shown by the two scholars and many others like them in the conference are tremendously valuable to the course I am developing right now.

The second takeaway might sound somewhat contradicting to the first, but, I find that it is important to remember there is no one formula that guarantees success on the online platform. Although there are some proven methods to improve MOOC courses as discussed above, this new way of creating a global, non-restricted teaching and leaning environment for all members of the public has encountered many unexpected challenges and we need to figure out what to do as we go along.

The sharing session on copyright-related issues, for one, was both helpful and confusing. On the one hand, I could learn a lot from the cumulative experiences of the expert panel members and participating educators in dealing with the legal matters; on the other hand, the circumstance and the nature of each course is different and thus, in the end, there is no straightforward procedure one can follow in this regard.

The same goes to the marketing strategies of promoting the courses. In this workshop, while I could learn a great deal about the basics such as search engine optimization and social media integration as well as other common public relations planning, the participants’ experienced outcomes greatly differed for the same methods. University brand, country, timing, targeted student groups, public’s demand, industry’s demand and all other factors obviously come into play, and thus, one’s experience cannot be easily duplicated by others.

The second takeaway is nothing unexpected or insightful but it was a reminder for me that in practice I need to try everything I can for my upcoming course and see what comes out. The two-day conference taught me not to be afraid of making mistakes because that was the way other colleagues have been tackling the MOOC.

In one workshop, two researchers showed us their horribly executed web-cam video lectures they used for their first MOOCs and their dramatically improved third iterations, which put me at ease as it has taken some pressure off my shoulders; at the same time, their presentations made me realize that we teachers are also learners in this global endeavor and we all learn something important for our trade along the way.

One of the University’s strategic research themes under the ‘Community Area’ hosted by the Faculty of Education is The Sciences of Learning Strategic Research Theme (SoL-SRT). A component of this theme was the Spring Symposium 27-28 February: Young Researchers in the Science of Learning, hosted by the Laboratory for Communication Science, SoL and the Faculty of Education.

This symposium showcased the findings of postgraduate students, post-docs and RAPs across all faculties in the university in order to promote the cross pollination of ideas and encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration. Testimony to the breadth of topics are the variety of keynote speeches, which explored Neuropsychology, Computer Science and Engineering, and Psychology and Human Development. Post-doc presentations drew on research conducted in fields including Speech and Hearing Science, Medicine, Psychology, and Human Performance.

Preceding these highly innovative and engaging discussions was a series of talks which explored new methods in the Science of Learning. The E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit’s Steve Roberts delivered a presentation which looked at how to maximise germane cognitive processing of the viewer of educational videos, and minimise extraneous cognitive load*. Richard Mayer’s Educational Psychology research into multimedia learning formed the backbone of the discussion and initiated a series of questions which touched on learner expectations, available tools, and best practices given potential resource constraints.

The enthusiasm behind the possibilities to collaborate through cross-disciplinary research and chats around how to bridge research and pedagogy were inspiring. Many thanks to the symposium hosts for this fantastic opportunity to learn from peers and colleagues!

*If your centre, division or faculty would like to discuss the principles underlying cognitive load in video production, please contact an instructional designer at the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit.

Organized by
e-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, CETL

Abstract

From September to December last year, HKU’s first MOOC HKU01x Epidemics ran on the edX platform. Over 10,000 learners enrolled on the course taught by 12 experts in the field, with 12% of students earning a certificate of completion on HKU’s successful first venture into the world of MOOCs. However, the preparation started one year beforehand and the knowledge gained, the experiences shared and the lessons learned will resonate long after the course itself has finished.

In this seminar, the speakers will explore various viewpoints arising from HKU01x Epidemics: the institutional perspective for HKU and how it relates to current and future MOOC development; the professors’ perspective on leading and teaching in a MOOC; the perspective of a coordinator and facilitator; the students’ perspective, gathered from research data; and the development and implementation perspective from the instructional designers. Join us as we look back on this rewarding experience and look forward to HKU’s increasing presence in online learning.

About the Speakers

Joseph Wu leads the infectious disease modeling research in the HKU School of Public Health. In 2014, Joseph led the production of HKU’s first MOOC Epidemics which had more than 10,000 enrollees on the edX platform.

Chao Quan is involved in undergraduate teaching for the MBBS TB Clerkship/Emergency Medicine modules. He has also developed HKU’s MOOC, Epidemics.

Jingli Cheng and Darren Harbutt are instructional designers in the E-learning Pedagogical Support Unit, who helped to design, build and run Epidemics.

Ricky Kwok is Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) and Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at HKU. His work focuses on e-learning, and he is currently leading EPSU to work on HKU MOOCs.

Sandwiches will be served with coffee and tea.