Week 15: Final course reflections

After reflecting on my semester's worth of blog posts for this class, I realized many of my views about online schooling aspects have changed:

• How I viewed online schooling as a disruptive innovation has shifted. In week 1, I viewed online learning purely as a “shift in the learning platform” and as “an opportunity” (Christensen, Chp. 4, “Disruptively Deploying Computers”). By Week 14, I saw the effects of disruptive innovation in a more complex light, recognizing the value of a blended traditional and online schooling approach. (I wrote about this extensively in the class discussions forums).
  
• I am much more skeptical of for-profit virtual schools than I was at the start of the semester; I wasn't aware of the online schooling marketplace, its stakeholders, and the power many wield. With the resources some for-profits have, they're able to produce more professionally marketed web sites and can offer more multimedia in their courses. On many of the district virtual school sites, their sites look very “template-made” and they offer little in the way of multimedia; this less-professional look could put them at a disadvantage in the marketplace, even though their product may be equal or better than what is offered at for-profit outlets. (Sometimes these entities aren't in direct competition for the same students, however.)
  While I think for-profit virtual schools can offer a quality education, research we read definitely pointed to instances where, time and again, online schooling was used to either save money for a school district or make money for a for-profit company. This issue has stayed with me because in a for-profit world, if these schools ever stop making money and their investors decide they are too costly to continue operating, what will happen to the education they offer and the role they play in the school world (and marketplace)? Where will their students go if they close? I think that non-profit and not-for-profit models must be supported to provide stability in a rapidly changing and uncertain marketplace. (Could online schooling for-profits be experiencing some sort of bubble? I don't follow their stock prices -- I'm just curious about this based on other bubbles the U.S. economy has recently experienced.)

• After taking this class, I thoroughly know what virtual schooling is and how it will continue to play a huge role in every aspect of education, presently and increasingly in the future. I spoke to a representative from K12 on the phone, looked at many other virtual schools' web sites, read what other students in the class discovered, interviewed other online learners, and delved into the assigned studies and articles. I now have first-hand experience with the online school world outside of TC classes (which are the only online classes I've taken), and this knowledge has made me both an “educated consumer” and an “educated educator."

• The mid-term project creation, and review of other students' work, provided me with direct experience and a wide perspective of how different online curriculum must be from f2f/traditional curriculum in order to be successful. Online schools offer such amazing possibilities to support multimodal expression and learning.

• Student-to-student interaction, synchronous vs. asynchronous discussions, offering how-to-succeed in online class orientations vs. not offering them, credit recovery motives vs. extra enrichment reasons to take online classes, professional development to help new online instructors understand what world they're stepping into, accountability and assessment in online schooling with so many different course providers – all these issues are vitally important to understand, and I wasn't as aware of them at the class's start.

• While virtual schooling is a very strong educational platform, it is not appropriate for elementary and lower middle school grades. Before I took this class, I wasn't aware that anyone had even considered online schooling for younger children; I now know with more surety that this format isn't developmentally appropriate for all ages.

Overall, I am an even bigger supportive of online schooling now because I've learned how it can be made an optimal experience, the factors that can detract from quality, how popular this format is becoming, and how important it could be to guaranteeing more access and equity in education -- IF it is done in thoughtful, carefully designed ways with the priorities on quality education for all. In addition, more and more online schooling opportunities are being offered, of varying qualities and for many different reasons and student groups. Because of this, there are countless areas of research which need to be looked into as this new field grows.

Week 14: The most difficult aspect to researching final project

One of the most difficult aspects of the research was finding conclusions and answers to my research questions. MOOCs are a very new format of digital online learning (starting in 2008). Not many studies have been done about them. The few that exist are qualitative and rely on small sample sizes for data. Still, they have succeeded in capturing and confirming the difficulties of participating in a MOOC: primarily, its lack of structure and too much information to process; secondarily, if one isn't comfortable with the software and websites needed for participation, many barriers to deep engagement.

Ideally, I would like to have found out answers about how participants benefit from MOOCs, looking at the different participation levels at which they self-select and how they handle processing so much information and making sense of it. I think there are many research possibilities here: self-regulated learning (is this a skill that can be taught?), dealing with cognitive overload and lessening its effects, how design/tool usage can help people process information better. No studies have yet been done about these aspects.

I found the three levels of participation interesting and worthy of study, as it seems that participants are getting different benefits from all three. Lurking, which consists mostly of reading posts in discussion forums, is available to all. Being “memorably active”, which requires creating projects and offering them to the group for feedback, entails being fluent in any media creation software, time to make the project, and already having a fair amount of knowledge on the topic. I can assume that, as with all learning, MOOC participants “start where they are”; are there conditions, however, that should be met prior to participating in a MOOC which could optimize the benefits of it?

Running my own survey gave me answers that I needed in order to confirm my experience and to help me think about how to adapt MOOCs for middle and high school students. Through the generous idea sharing and anecdotes from the self-selected sample, I read about many helpful ideas and insights that I could use in developing a MOOC for younger students. At this point, it is still a lot of trial and error, as with many other parts of online learning. I'm seeing more clearly how, with a group working together on it, educators will eventually figure out best practices, models and designs.

Recommending that we do interviews was a great idea, as it provided me the opportunity to get information that I needed to learn more about the relatively new and quickly evolving field of online learning. In these conversations, via Skype and email, I was able to ask questions that helped me fill in gaps in my knowledge about the topic. They acted as supplements to the information found in the few studies. Since I think that well-done qualitative studies can be very useful, and these interviews could be the basis for doing a more in-depth set of interviews on the topic, they might point me in the right direction for some conclusive findings about how MOOCs work.

New questions:

-When a field is very new and there are few studies available, how are these initial studies viewed?
-What is the best way to conduct research on topics that have so many variables?

-When a topic has very few studies to orient researchers, what is the best way to approach research?