Golden advice on designing a MOOC (part 1)

Over the first month of this year we have talked to quite a few people to get their advice on our LeaderMOOC project. (See pre-announcement on CCL's corporate blog.) In short: we know one or two things about leadership development, and we are intrigued by the MOOC phenomenon to reach people who wouldn't otherwise be able to benefit from leadership basics. As we speak, the learning field is finding out more and more about MOOCs but there are no dominant designs or business models as of yet.  What better way to find out its effectiveness and sustainability for leadership development than to actually pilot one? It is coming in September, and I'll keep you posted.

But first, let me list the golden advice that we collected in the first months of this project. Below advice is compiled from talking to -in random order- Inge De Waardt (did two MobiMOOCs, just published an ebook on the subject and is now doing a PhD at the Open University in the UK), Chris Patton (speaker on his healthinformaticsforum.com MOOC at London's Learning Technologies conference), Hans de Zwart (fellow blogger, learning innovator and fan of open), Charles Jennings (also blogger, member of the Internet Time Alliance and currently busy starting up the 702010 forum), Jay Cross (speaker and blogger on a walkabout, founder of Internet Time Alliance, hosted a Google Hangout on MOOCs + Business), Clive Shepherd (author of The New Learning Architect, of course also a blogger and conference speaker), Wilfred Rubens (he blogs faster than his shadow, works at the Open University in The Netherlands on MOOC platform projects and others), and many people working for the Center for Creative Leadership. Here is a compiled version of their MOOC design tips. To all of you:

Golden advice for designing MOOCs

1- Find out what's a MOOC to you...

MOOC, MOOC, MOOC ... it is all over the higher education world. So first tip is to find out what it means to you and your project. They MOOC madness lead one of our interviewees to state “MOOC is a fuzzy term, it doesn’t really mean anything” (Chris Patton). If you see the cMOOC and xMOOC variants, there are already a lot of differences. Do you want to have a 'pure' MOOC based on connectivism theory or a 'popular/traditional' one where you give people a series of video, quiz and assignments?

(Illustration taken from the Technology Cheat Sheet Infographic.)

• Massive : So big that network learning occurs. It for example means you need a critical mass so people can cluster around their preferred topics and passions and go their own way if they feel like doing so. It also means so big that you need VERY scalable technology that doesn't break down when 1000 users hit a button simultaneously. (So forget about your corporate IT, they might hate you forever.) It also means so big that you just CANNOT create personal links with all participants - they'll need to create the links and interactions mostly among themselves and you create the environment and platform to do so. (Take for example the attempts to get  peer evaluation working in MOOCs, you just can't do it all yourself even if you felt you needed to...)
• Open: Mostly this means for free today, but that might change. It for sure means you cannot exclude anyone from participating - not even your lurking competitors. This is different from a traditional design where you know exactly who you'll have in front of you and design for accordingly. Open might mean using freely available (Creative Commons and/or Open Educational Resources) content. Open might even mean an open design. So what is open to you? To paraphrase a colleague from another business school:  he is very intrigued by our project, and wishes his institution would be so bold and disruptive but they have an issue with the ‘open’ part which he thinks is the biggest hurdle to overcome. For corporations entering the MOOC space especially this is a fine line to walk. Stephen Downes thinks MOOC and corporations are by definition incompatible because corporations want to be closed.
• Online: This means the platform(s) for content, interaction, reflection etc are all online in the cloud. Maybe they are also mobile. It doesn't mean however you don't encourage people participating in the MOOC to join up at a local Starbucks to discuss.
• Course: well.... this is the standard unit of learning, isn't it. Maybe you want to prefer thinking about a development journey.

2- Start with everything you know about distance learning

As Inge states: "The idea of a MOOC is not so new, only the scale is different." She suggests to start with everything you know about distance learning and adapt that to your audience.

Over the past decades we learned a lot about creating engaging and effective learning experiences outside of classes. Start with all that - it is still good. Then take the characteristics of the MOOC above into consideration and the specifics of your project. But don't reinvent wheels that needn't reinventing - MOOCs are a new format of distance online learning.

3- Have your audiences in mind

By nature of a MOOC, you can't and don't want to exclude anyone who participates. Who are you to decide whether someone will benefit your MOOC? However, you do want to have a clear picture of the people you expect. Maybe you are wrong and need adjusting mid-MOOC. Have a look at statistics on other MOOCs. For example, expect half of participants not to be native English speakers, expect lots to come outside of US and Europe, expect a lot of lurkers, etc.

Above: taken from e-Literate blog. Research on prior MOOCs may give you a baseline of the audience to expect and their level of participation throughout the lifetime of a MOOC. 

For our LeaderMOOC, we did an empathy mapping exercise on the 4 profiles we are targeting - fully aware that lots of others will join up and happy they will. We will also have a pre-MOOC questionnaire that asks people why they enroll - what they want to get out of the MOOC.

(Above: Ron and Sandrine, the other two colleagues I'm driving this project with. You can see some empathy mapping in the background, and we are looking at the business model canvas to try out several ways to make a MOOC sustainable.)

That's enough for today, I'll post the rest another day...