DML Research Hub – Not Just MOOCs

Well it was a great time at last week’s Digital Media and Learning/ DML Research Hub  conference in Boston.

Not only did I run into one of my professors at the event (Pia Sörensen from edX’s Science and Cooking), but I also had the chance to hang out (albeit too briefly) with Jim Groom, the man who coined the term “Edupunk” and someone who shares my obsession with both EdTech and non-mainstream film (which gave me the chance to talk both about the political economy of education and the Leprechaun film franchise).

But I digress (albeit not by much).  For one thing digital education and the exploitation film industry have in common is a grassroots dynamic that lets a million flowers bloom (or, as a headline describing the capitalism-driven transformation of the Chinese undergarment industry put it: “a million bloomers flower”).  And, as the many sessions at DML Hub highlighted, MOOCs are just one small component of a diversification in education that is going on both in front of and behind the camera (an image invoked frequently by Cathy Davidson in her History and Future of Higher Education  MOOC, Cathy also being an attendee at DML).

Sorry, where was I?  Oh yes: it’s not just MOOCs.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am obviously a fan of MOOCs, having subjected myself to dozens of them over the course of my One Year BA project.  And while my fan-dom has always consisted of being optimistic about what they might eventually become, one of the things they have always provided is all course components in a single location, delivered via a metaphor that makes taking a MOOC a familiar (and thus easier to comprehend) experience.

But even my One Year BA consisted of a number of courses that didn’t fall into the MOOC category, including a curated course provided by the Saylor Foundation, my own attempts at self-curation, some lecture-only courses from places like iTunes U and, of course, my Senior Thesis.

And that Senior Thesis should really be seen as the culmination of another component of an educational experience where MOOCs, not philosophy, was my area of concentration (or, in college terms, I had a double major in philosophy and MOOCs).  For the blog you are reading has now grown to 222 postings on the subject of massive open online courses.  And if you fold in podcast scripts and interviews, newsletters and that upcoming MIT book/Senior Thesis, I’ve written somewhere over 350,000 words on this subject over the course of the last twelve months.

A friend of mine has his own EdTech campaign to try to get parents to urge their kids to blog on a daily basis, with grandparents signed up to receive a feed of their grandkids’ regular postings.  And while motivating kids to make such a commitment faces challenges, I can definitely attest to the fact that one of the best ways to learn about a subject is to totally immerse yourself in it and write about that immersive experience on a regular (ideally daily) basis.

Getting back to those non-MOOC classes I mentioned, as memorable as were many of the MOOCs I took last year, the courses I think about the most are the ones that fell outside the MOOC category (notably curated or self-curated courses in Existentialism, Kant and Pragmatic philosophy).  Now it may be that those were subjects I was fascinated enough with to locate or build a course around them, even when no MOOC was available.  But I also think that having to put the work into locating educational resources and stringing them into something meaningful is an example of “putting learning to work” that plays such a big role with retention.

And like most of the educational experiments being discussed at DML, those memorable curated courses were not built around massiveness, or even bigness.  Rather, they were built around the subject matter with a classroom holding just a single student.

Now learning alone is clearly not the answer to all educational questions, any more than is learning with 50,000 people in a MOOC classroom.  But in between those two extremes there exists a huge variety of educational experiences either in place or being developed by people with the energy and vision I encountered at DML 2014.  So while I maintain my optimism over MOOCs, that optimism is part of a wider eagerness to see how technology coupled with creativity and drive transforms education in the decades to come.