Sep 18, 2013

LeaderMOOC Behind The Scenes: Fighting Elitism - or are we?

The noble goal

One of my personal motivations to spend countless evenings and weekends to get LeaderMOOC as good as it gets has been the drive to scale up and democratize leadership development. It is neither right nor needed that leadership development is reserved for the happy few. In that context, I refer a lot to the quote of Dave Altman - former head of our research department and now leading the Brussels campus.
“The industry needs to ask itself how leadership development became so elitist. The world’s challenges are big enough now that we need to think about how we can democratize leadership development, take it back to the masses — to the base and middle of the socioeconomic pyramid, not only the peak.” David Altman
Then I came across the article "The Pedagogical-Elitarian character of connectivist MOOCs" (in Dutch) by Wilfred Rubens and the article "In Connectivism, noone can hear you scream.". They make a point, MOOCs are not for everyone either. I've come to realize that MOOCs are elitist in a way too, but in different ways. A quote from the latter article states a chicken-and-egg problem and a barrier for novices to benefit from a MOOC:
To learn in a cMOOC you need to connect.To connect in a cMOOC you need to learn. 
The elitism in Dave's quote is largely about being able to afford leadership programs and individual coaching and mentoring. Just have a look at the fees the industry and business schools are charging. With a Massive Open Online Course, the barrier to being allowed to participate is gone: MOOCs are OPEN - no one will tell you that you cannot join, handpick you for development, or put you on a waiting list. Also the barrier of cost (at least in the current generation of MOOCs) is not valid anymore: most MOOCs are free or low cost. That is the good news. The other news is that there are still hurdles and therefore other kinds of elitism. A lot of LeaderMOOC participants for example struggle with the technological barrier or MOOC overload, and it isn't even a cMOOC.

The technological 'haves'

Obviously since most if not all of a MOOC experience is online, you need the hardware and network connection. That means computers, smartphones, apps, reliable broadband connections, etc. There are big initiatives worldwide to get Internet to remote areas and underprivileged areas, but it is a very existing barrier. Is that one of the reasons why in LeaderMOOC we see a lot of dominance of the western countries, and less participation from Africa?


The technological 'savvy'

But having the technology is not enough - a MOOC will also require participants who are able to navigate the MOOC platforms or mashup, to use various tools, to have discussions in an online forum, follow links outside of the course and find the way back, create their profile pages, create digital artifacts and upload them, etc. In short it requires a degree of 'IT end user skills' that should not be underestimated. In LeaderMOOC I got a lot of feedback from persons who are technological savvy in the sense that they do emails, work with various online tools in their daily jobs, have all the MS Office skills you could need, but still struggled immensely with the LeaderMOOC platform and interface. It is one of the reasons we had an Orientation Week - but I wonder how much of the dropout (no shows or not coming back after one visit) is actually caused by this very barrier. I think the xMOOC platforms are very user friendly, including Canvas.net. And yet...
I need to confess that I'm not good with people staring at a screen like rabbits into a light, I need to control the urge to scream: "There is only one button on the page and it says 'Next' - how do you mean you are stuck? This is 2013 already - where have you been in the past decade?". Of course that doesn't help anyone, so I did what I never thought I'd do: I created a LeaderMOOC survival guide to help people at least find the home page (for some reason a lot of the people I talked with in the first week never had seen our home page - which is the page that is supposed to make it easy to navigate to all corners of the course). You can download a sample here if you want:


The trickiest part of the LeaderMOOC technology has proven to be the peer reviewed assignments - it is very specific to a MOOC and therefore new to many people, including us. Another statistic was very surprising to me: more than a third of LeaderMOOC participants have never done an online course before. I don't know if this has to do with the fact that elearning has for good reasons and bad reasons been lagging in adoption compared to other fields, as I've ranted about earlier in 'who is afraid of blended learning?'





Self-Directed Learning barrier

And now the biggest barrier that creates a new elitism: a MOOC is an ideal platform for the 'free range learners' among us. The people that can today practice 'Do It Yourself' learning and 'unschooling' will thrive in such environment, but others might drown. I consider myself being able to direct my own learning very well, and I even assumed in my book Homo Competens this is true for most people. I'm not so sure anymore. I do agree with Hans de Zwart that a lot more people might become very good at it, but they are suffering from learned helplessness on taking the driver's seat and responsibility of their own development. (See also Hans' blog posts Changing the Responsibility for learning and Do It Yourself learning.) It takes a certain mindset to be able to bring a MOOC to a good end, a lot of self-discipline, being able to cope with information overload and fuzziness. The M in MOOC might just as well stand for Messy Open Online Course. One illustration: in LeaderMOOC we got a lot of questions about the due dates and the 'checkmarks' for completion next to a learning activity. People want to 'comply' with what we as course designers ask from them so they get ... well.... there is no diploma on this one. We can cure many people from learned helplessness but it takes time.

Not one to rule them all

So in the end we have a newly emerging format - the MOOC - that did break elitism on important areas (free, open access), but still has barriers on technology, technological savvy and Self-Directed Learning. It creates a different kind of elitism: those who can drive their own learning and are connected, versus those who are not. What I find positive about these new barriers is that they are less permanent than the financial ones and people can overcome them within time. So let's end on that positive note. MOOCs are not a new format 'to rule them all'. It is not Lord of the Rings. MOOCs are a format that can reach a lot of people that otherwise cannot benefit from development, but it is still not 'for all'.

Previously:





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