Czerniewicz MOOCs OER Networked Learning Conference 2016

MOOCs, openness and changing
educator practices: an Activity
Theory case study
Laura Czerniewicz (presenter)
Michael Glover, Andrew Deacon, Sukaina Walji
laura.czerniewicz@uct.ac.za / @czernie
Paper at http://www.networkedlearningconference.org.uk/abstracts/pdf/P26.pdf

Context
• Global South low producers of OER
• Participate relatively minimally in open learning and
teaching
• Emerging culture of enabling openness at UCT, open agenda
• Cape Town Open Declaration 2008; Berlin Declaration 2011;
Open Scholarship; OERUCT; OpenUCT
• UCT MOOCs project (3 years, 12 MOOCs)
• Grantee of ROER4D Impact Study (Sub-project 10.3)
Links
UCT MOOCs: http://www.cilt.uct.ac.za/cilt/moocs-project-uct
ROER4D Sub-project 10.3: http://roer4d.org/sp10-3-impact-of-oer-in-and-as-moocs-in-south-africa

One of first major MOOC
initiatives in Africa
Partnership with FutureLearn
and Coursera
12 MOOCS+ over 3 years
Intention for OER outputs of
MOOC materials
4 MOOCs researched
Medicine and the Arts:
What is a Mind?
UCT MOOCs project
What is a Mind?
Understanding clinical research
Education for all

Research question
Interested in whether and how educators’
practices become more open – through the
process of creating and teaching in a MOOC
How do educators’ openness-related practices change
(or not change) when using (or not using – OER) in and
as a MOOC?
http://roer4d.org/sp10-3-impact-of-oer-in-and-as-moocs-in-south-africa

Elaborated questions
• How do educators engage with Open Educational Resources
(OERs) and openness as part of the MOOC’s development?
• How do educators’ practices change or not change when using (or
not using) OERs in and as a MOOC?
• Did the educators’ practices change? – In what way?
• Did educators’ (reported) practices become more open?
• What was their understanding of openness before the MOOC
ran?
• What was their understanding of openness after the MOOC
ran?
• How did it change?

Medicine and the Arts: Humanising
Healthcare

Conceptual framework
• Activity Theory as heuristic to thickly describe
changes in educators’ practices and perceptions
• Explanatory device to capture change and
‘contradictions’ as sites of
change/adaption/innovation
• Captures system in which educators strive
for/consider their object
• Examine effect of adding two new tools:
• Creative Commons (CC) licenses
• MOOC platform (broadly conceived)

• Locate educators’ practices and perceptions in context of
mediating artefacts
• Activity Theory (Engëström 1987)
• tools, rules, community, division of
labour, object
• ‘Subjects’ (lead educators) strive
towards ‘object’ (developing new
interdisciplinary field) in an activity
system
• Activity systems are object-directed
• Context is not just ‘out there’ (Nardi 1996)
• Mental processes and acts
inextricably entwined with context

• Openness 1- Hodgkinson –Williams (2014)
the factors influencing the ease of adopting OEPs
synthesis from literature
1. Technical openness – e.g. interoperability and open formats, technical
skill and resources, availability and discoverability
2. Legal openness – e.g. open licensing knowledge and advice.
3. Cultural openness – e.g. knowledge (on a continuum between
homogenous and diverse) and curriculum (on a continuum between
institutionalised and autonomous)
4. Pedagogical openness – e.g. student demographics and types of
engagement (who is the imagined audience? Is it conventional or
imagined as diverse contextually differentiated e.g. pedagogic strategy
(choices around how one teaches and facilitates learning – dialogic,
didactic, collaborative, experimental)
5. Financial openness (should OERs be free or come with a modest
financial price tag?)

• Openness 2- Beetham (2012) features of open practices
features of paradigmatic openness, empirically
developed
1. Opening up content to students not on
campus/formally enrolled
2. Sharing and collaborating on content with other
practitioners
3. Re-using content in teaching contexts
4. Using or encouraging others to use open content
5. Making knowledge publicly accessible
6. Teaching learning in open contexts

Methodology
• Case study analysis
• Insert educator ‘subjectivity’ into analysis, via:
• open-ended semi-structured interviews
• post-MOOC reflection focus groups
• Theory framed analysis
• Code according to Activity Theory nodes,
openness, emerging themes

Methodology
• Interviews before MOOC, immediately after, 6
months later
• Interviewees: 2 MOOC lead educators + 13
guest educators
• Longitudinal (change over time)
• For this analysis - one MOOC at two time
intervals (before and immediately after)

Findings
Tool node mediates subjects’ (lead educators)
striving toward object; we found that educators:
1) Engaged with the role of OER and openness in
MOOCs
2) Perceived affordances of the MOOC format
3) Reflected on educational practices in different
contexts

Activity System 1
Figure 1: MOOC 1A (before MOOC is
live)

Activity system 1
Understandings of OER/Perceived role of openness
Nascent understanding of OER
• Two of 14 educators familiar with OER or broad open movement
• Understandings of openness general: “it’s free for everybody and open
access” (LF)
• None of the 14 academics articulated a relationship between intellectual
property copy right and CC licenses and how the latter can transform
educational resources into OERs
• Interviews revealed that educators did not create OER for the MOOC (or
transform the MOOC into an OER) for ideological or theoretical reasons
• Majority positive about open character of MOOC

Activity system 1, themes
Understandings of OER/Perceived role of
openness
Reaching out beyond the university
Access to knowledge which is “all nicely packaged into
tertiary institutions and never goes anywhere” (ML)
MOOC serve as “social responsiveness” to communities
and continent (ML)
Access and reach beyond conventional university setting

Affordances of the MOOC
Tentative understandings of what MOOCs might do
“one step in the right direction” (LE1) to “build mass critical
thinking” (LE1) and start a “conversation” (LE2) about their
interdisciplinary field
MOOC accessibility as “opportunity” to “find new
collaborations around the world” (LE2)
“unless you put something out there you’re not going to
create new links” (LE2)
Absent entry requirements, MOOC could act as “sort of
levelling platform” (LE2)
MOOC constitutes a tangible “archive of an idea” (LE1)

Reflection on educational practices
“You’ve got seven minutes to put across maybe a whole range of
complex ideas, you have to think about each word, each phrase,
each sentence, you have to script it quite carefully, you have to
engage people” (LE2)

Reflection on course design:
“[I]n terms of structure… the MOOC, because of the
framework, has given me some new skills after 20 years
of doing this, to think about how to structure
assignments, students’ engagement with the lectures, so
that’s also been really helpful.” (LE1)

Developing the MOOC had taught her/him “how
to start thinking about bridging online and
offline” in her/his teaching (LE1)
Brought home the “significance of building an
archive” which would permit global access for
their new field (LE1)

Activity System 2
Figure 2: MOOC 1B (after MOOC has
run)

Activity System 2
Two significant differences between the first and
second activity systems
1) MOOC and its OER components are
operationalised, i.e., the course has gone live
and has run its six week duration
2) Thousands of new participants (MOOC
learners) have entered the community node
of the activity system

Understandings of OER/Perceived role of openness
Understanding of openness as reach and access
MOOC’s global open reach enabled personal and
intellectual “synergies” between participants (LE1)
For developing new field, MOOC is more effective than
“even the biggest conferences” where it’s a “relatively
small audience that you reach” (LE2)
Ideas in MOOC received and reflected in a wide diversity
of contexts (which university can’t achieve) (LE2)

Participation and contribution of MOOC participants
MOOC fostered “bi-directional” learning with “many people
offering useful readings, links, poetry, Youtube clips etc.” (HM)
LE2: “I felt more and more like a learner and less and less like a
teacher. I was learning as much from people’s comments as
anybody else – - I was fascinated to see the interpretations
that people brought the other resources that people brought,
the perspectives that they brought that enhanced what we
had put out there”

Participation and contribution of MOOC participants
As participants add content the archive “builds itself up” (LE1)
“profundity of space” for fostering wide community, which one
“cannot achieve in a university classroom” (LE1)
MOOC was able to “tap into deep reservoirs of people’s interests”
(LE1)

Depth and quality of engagement
MOOC enables “depth of engagement” (LE2)
“If I could get that level of engagement from all my students it
would be amazing” (LE2)
“I see the potential of deep learning online where you never
meet the participants face to face” (LE2).
LE2 convinced that “the online space was just as deep and in
some cases a lot more intimate than a classroom space, a face
to face space” (LE2)

Power relations and reuse
Global accessibility, no entry requirements made learning
environment more “flat” and “egalitarian” (LE2)
MOOC’s afterlife: use for classroom teaching and
“spawning new research ideas” (LE1)

Focus attention on content presentation
Reconsider offering same lecture “40 times”, educator
“probably a bit tired by now” (LE2)
“whereas if I thought about it in the way we did with the
MOOCs and set it up and scripted it and thought about
exactly what I really want to emphasise here and what
questions did I want to ask, I’d have a more engaged student
response - I’m sure I would… it’s about the preparation of the
material and the presentation of it” (LE2)

Formation of learning communities
“There’s something about the formation of a
community, and the irony is that it seemed to
have congealed in a more palpable way on the
MOOC site, than it does in my face to face
teaching” (LE1)

New ideas for traditional face-to-face teaching
- Opportunities for social media use in face-to-face teaching
“So it’s alerting you to a, kind of, a research agenda,
but...and at the same time, to the possibility of a social
media for teaching”. [LE1]
- LE1 wanted to “try and see if what I’ve learnt from the
MOOC, in terms of the significance of community, and
really, sharing of stories, can somehow build that back into
our undergraduate teaching”.
- Use components of the MOOC as a “springboard” for
classroom teaching .(LE1)

Concluding remarks
Activity theory useful conceptual framework for tracking
educator practices in “authentic contexts” (Porter 2013)
AT enabled thick description of educators’ changing
perceptions of
• Affordances of the MOOC
• The role of Openness
Allowed tracking of educators’ reconceptualisation of
face-to-face teaching and intent to change practices

References
• Barab, S. A., Barnett, M., Yamagata-Lynch, L., Squire, K., & Keating, T. (2002). Using activity theory to understand the
systemic tensions characterizing a technology-rich introductory astronomy course. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 9(2), 76-
107.
• Beetham, H., Falconer, I., McGill, L., & Littlejohn, A. (2012). JISC open practices: Briefing paper.
• Hodgkinson-Williams, C. A. (2014). Degrees of Ease: Adoption of OER, OpenTextbooks and MOOCs in the Global South.
Keynote address at the OER Asia Symposium 2014. Available online: https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/1188
• Dippe, G. (2006). The missing teacher: Contradictions and conflicts in the experience of online learners. In Fifth
International Conference on Networked Learning 2006 (pp. 8-pages).
• Engestrom Y 1987. Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretic approach to developmental research. Helsinki: Orienta-
Konsultit Oy.
• Hardman, J. (2005). An exploratory case study of computer use in a primary school mathematics classroom: new
technology, new pedagogy?: research: information and communication technologies. Perspectives in Education:
Recearch on ICTs and Education in South Africa: Special Issue 4, 23, p-99.
• Murphy, E., & Manzanares, M. A. R. (2008). Contradictions between the virtual and physical high school classroom: A
third‐generation Activity Theory perspective. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(6), 1061-1072.
• Murphy, E. & Rodriguez-Manzanares, M. (2014). Activity Theory perspectives on technology in higher education. Hershey,
Pennsylvania: IGI Global.
• Nardi, B. A. (1996). Studying context: A comparison of activity theory, situated action models, and distributed cognition.
Context and consciousness: Activity theory and human-computer interaction, 69-102.
• Nelson, C. P., & Kim, M. K. (2001). Contradictions, Appropriation, and Transformation: An Activity Theory Approach to L2
Writing and Classroom Practices. Texas papers in foreign language education, 6(1), 37-62
• Peruski, L., & Mishra, P. (2004). Webs of Activity in Online Course Design and Teaching. ALT-J: Research in Learning
Technology, 12(1), 37-49.
• Porter, D. A. (2013). Exploring the practices of educators using open educational resources (OER) in the British Columbia
higher education system (Doctoral dissertation, Education: Faculty of Education).

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