MOOC Discussion: Flame Wars

Word has it that a flame war has broken out in the discussion boards of one of the more recently started MOOCs, causing some agita on the part of the instructor who has been forced to delete some discussion threads and accounts, as well as have to deal with angry communications from students who felt that his threats to shut down discussion (or even the course) was a “bluff.”

Personally, I’m not surprised that among the tens of thousands of people enrolled in any MOOC class, you’ll find some folks who want to treat educational discussion forums as if they were the same as the comments boards on a news site (especially ones below a controversial political story which attract partisans who think they can “win” a debate by shouting down their opponents).  But I am surprised that these negative comments have managed to get noticed (to the point of generating controversy).

For as I’ve mentioned before, my challenge with MOOC-based discussion is not that too many people are posting ugly, noisy, irrelevant things just to hear their own voice, but that the sheer volume of commentary associated with even the smallest MOOC means that quality comments get so drowned in a sea of threads that discussion rarely moves past monologue.

For instance, 60,000 people registered to take edX’s Justice course, and part of each week’s assignments was to respond to a pair of prompts with replies that would appear in the message boards for all to see and respond to.  But assuming that just 10% of students were involved with these assignments, that would mean 12,000 new threads got started each week (which explains why most of those threads consist of nothing more than the originating comment).

Other courses (like the Coursera Common Law class I just started) have 100% voluntary commenting systems (like the ones you’d find in most bulletin boards).  But even there, the course has generated over 300 threads in the first week alone, of which only a handful have ended up with some decent back and forth.

In order to see if flame wars are a natural outgrowth of MOOC discussion, I made a highly unscientific study of those Common Law boards to see if charged issues led to the kind of shouting matches that are so commonplace in most political forums.

Within a sub-thread entitled “If you could write a law, what would it be?” two sub-threads (one on the death penalty, one on abortion rights) generated over 50 comments each.  And given what usually happens when you start a discussion on either of these two topics that include people of opposing viewpoints, my guess was that if flaming was occurring this is where I’d find it.

But to my surprise, discussion in both those threads was civil and informed.  In fact, the only odd thing I found was that, given this course covers the origins of the English civil law, most of the people participating in those discussions seemed to have adopted the persona of a British barrister, talking (or writing anyway) in the clipped measured arguments you’d expect from someone trying to talk while balancing a huge white wig on their head.

So at least with regard to this one example, the pseudo-classroom created in the cloud seems to have exercised a civilizing influence on people involved with debate on even the most heated topics.  And while I have seen (and experienced) some unproductive discussions during my time on the boards in other classes, most of these have resulted in exasperation over points being ignored (again that monologue vs. dialog thing) vs. head-on collisions between people with diametrically opposed views on a debate-worthy subject.

Where discussion forums have been most productive (for me anyway) is when I’ve needed a single question answered.

For example, when I was reading Troilus and Cressida for a Shakespeare class (a play set during the Trojan War), I noticed that key characters were portrayed in a way quite at odds with how they were being interpreted in my Greek Heroes class that presented them in the context of The Iliad.  And when I asked about this in Greek Hero forums, someone got back to me within a couple of days with a description of what Troy-related texts Shakespeare would have had access to when writing his play, texts different than the ones we were using to study the same story in Heroes.

In other words, someone who knew a heck of a lot more than I did about this specific subject was not just in my MOOC community of shared interest, but was available to provide clarifying information drawn from expertise that he/she had and I didn’t.

So perhaps this is the role the boards are going to play until such time as someone finds a way to use them to create smaller sub-communities that can more replicate an intimate classroom: as a place where 5-10% of posts might lead to some decent discussion, and where you can find answers to your questions (provided you do a good job letting people know what these questions are in your subject lines).