Supporting Constructionism in the Classroom: Massive Open Online Course as Platform for Teacher Learning

• In Event: 72.041 - Leveraging Massive Open Online Courses to Foster Teacher Professional Development

Abstract

Scratch is a visual computer programming environment that young people can use to create their own interactive games, stories, animations, and art—and then share their creations with others in an online community. Educators interested in including Scratch as part of their teaching activities can benefit from learning about Scratch as a tool (i.e., how to use the programming language and the online community). They can also benefit from better understanding of the constructionist approaches to learning that Scratch was designed to encourage (i.e., how to support learning through designing, personalizing, sharing, and reflecting) (Brennan, 2013; Brennan & Resnick, 2013; Kafai & Burke, 2014). In response, through funding from Google, we have been hosting in-person “Creative Computing” workshops that enable teachers to have the kinds of constructionist learning experiences with Scratch that would ideally be made available to their students. In these multi-day workshops, teachers learn Scratch by engaging in hands-on, project-based learning and connect with teacher colleagues to discuss and reflect on their experiences. Unfortunately, these in-person workshops are space-constrained and each year we have received hundreds of applications for a limited number of workshop seats. Motivated by a desire to make the Creative Computing workshop accessible to a broader audience, we have more recently explored the potential for MOOCs to serve as a means of scaling the workshop (Brennan, 2014; Mindell, Brennan, Britton, Kay, & Rosato, 2014).

With high-profile initiatives like Udacity, Coursera, and EdX, MOOCs (particularly the xMOOC genre) have received enormous attention over the past several years. Most xMOOC platforms and courses follow a didactic structure, making a particular scope and sequence of content freely accessible to a large number of people online, and relying on video-based lectures and multiple-choice quizzes to accommodate scale (DeBoer, Ho, Stump, & Breslow, 2014; Seaton, Bergner, Chuang, Mitros, & Pritchard, 2014). How could this type of platform support a constructionist approach to learning that is less oriented toward the mastery of facts and skills and more focused on self-awareness, reflection, community, and changes in practice?

Our research explored the question of how to support teacher learning via MOOCs, using the transition of the Creative Computing workshop from a face-to-face experience to a large-scale, open, online experience as a case study. The case was developed from two perspectives: (1) from our perspective as designers, using journaling and observation as primary sources of data, and (2) from the perspective of participants, using pre/post participation surveys and semi-structured interviews with 18 teachers as primary sources of data. Analysis focused on key tensions between the aspirations of the designers and the intentions and lived experiences of the participants, including engaging with ideas and practices vs. negotiating the technological platform, balancing individual needs vs. community needs, and enabling choice vs. providing structure. The paper presents these key tensions and concludes with design principles for those interested in supporting teacher learning via MOOCs.

Authors

• Karen A. Brennan, Harvard University

• Sarah Blum-Smith, Harvard University

• Maxwell Yurkofsky, Harvard University