PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism

'Students should be at the centre of learning', declared Stephen Downes, 'because there is no other place they could possibly be.' Downes was speaking at the ELI 4th International Conference on e-Learning and Distance Education held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was one of several sound bites that exemplified the theme of his speech, Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment.

Although it's a fundamental principle of progressive education, keeping the student at the centre seems to be something that not many schools, colleges and universities are good at. Rows of seats still persist in the classrooms of many schools, and direct instruction still holds sway. Standardised tests are administered by schools who ignore the fact that all students are different, and bells continually punctuate the timetable, dividing the school day up into an unconnected parade of subjects, each delivered in content heavy lessons. One size never did fit everyone.

Stephen Downes was adamant in his view that personal learning is the way forward for all forms of education. He argued that in the new learning ecology, where technology can connect students to any others, and any content, any where in the world, is one in which content must change. Content, he said, should not be delivered by experts to passive recipients, but in a connected world where personal learning environments are controlled by the learners, content is actually a signal between one student and another.

We learn through collaboration, interaction and sharing he said, citing the formula for connectivist learning approaches he said: Aggregate, remix, repurpose and feed forward. Generally, this aligns to that held by many educators who subscribe to connectivist theory - that students not only consume content, they now have the capability, through their personal learning environments (PLEs), to mash it up with any other content, to create new content, extend it, remix it and share it across their network of friends and other connections. The learning comes not by memorising it, said Downes, but by using it, applying it. And this was exactly the guiding principle of the earliest MOOCs.

Downes bemoaned the fact that the original Massive Open Online Courses, run in free and flexible, student led ways and owned by students, had been sadly misappropriated by the large consortia, and now hardly resembled at all the first MOOCs of the last decade. The cMOOCs, connectivist (or some would argue Canadian) courses had been overtaken by the xMOOCs, and were now unrecognisable from their first form. cMOOCs still exist of course, but the popular format is now that of the mega-courses run by the likes of consortia such as Coursera and EdX. When asked by a member of the audience to comment on the huge non-completion rates of MOOCs, Downes said that most people do MOOCs because they are interested in the content and the interactions rather than gaining a qualification.

Photo from JISC Website


PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism by Steve Wheeler was posted from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.