Designing Professional Development for Open Online Learning: Lessons From Four Change Leadership MOOCs

• In Event: Designing Online Experiences to Support Teacher Learning and Professional Development Across Content Areas

Abstract

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offer new opportunities to serve a global population of educators looking for online professional learning (Seaton, Coleman, Daries, Chuang, 2014). To explore MOOC-based professional learning, we developed five courses on change leadership: Becoming a More Equitable Educator, Launching Innovation in Schools, Design Thinking for Leading and Learning, Envisioning the Graduate of the Future, and Competency-Based Education.

We developed our courses using a Blended Professional Community of Inquiry model, an adaptation of prior work from Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2010) and Vaughn (2010). The community of inquiry model holds that effective learning designs attend to cognitive, teaching, and social “presences”. We argue that blended professional learning needs to attend to local presence, how cohorts of learners interact in local study groups, and how learners apply new insights in local contexts.

As we run our courses, we collect data through trace logs, surveys, assignments, forums, and post-course interviews. From these cycles of design research, we have identified three pairs of design elements that are central to learning in our courses.

Learning Circles and Facilitator’s Guide. A Learning Circle is a facilitated group of learners who meet in person during an online course and ground course content in their specific context. Our implementation of Learning Circles was based on work by Peer2Peer University (P2PU) to support librarians in facilitating MOOC-based learning for patrons. The Facilitator’s Guide was designed so that participants with minimal domain knowledge in change leadership would feel comfortable organizing a regular discussion/action group with peers. The guide includes sample meeting agendas for each unit of the course, discussion questions, and suggestions for making activities and assignments more collaborative.

Action-Oriented Assignments and Case Studies. Course assignments support learners in community engagement; they ask participants to conduct exploration, reflection, planning, and evaluation. Learners submit artifacts from their interventions to course discussion forums for feedback and discussion. To help participants see what change leadership looks like in authentic school settings, each course includes a series of “Voices in Practice” mini-documentaries that showcase change leadership practices as they evolve across different communities. For instance, in Envisioning the Graduate of the Future, we documented practice in three schools: one starting a graduate profile development process, one in the thick of community-based profile development, and one with a completed graduate profile focused on revising program and curriculum.

Theory-Linked Activities and Take-Out Packages. Whenever possible, instruction about leadership theory is paired with specific activities that leaders can use. When we discuss the importance of reflecting on collaborative conversation, we engage participants in a specific protocol for debugging tough conversations: the Left-Hand Column Case. To help participants go from engaging in online activities to leading those practices in-person, we provide Take-Out Packages, instructions for facilitating and debriefing activities from our online course in face-to-face contexts.

In our presentation, we will illustrate these strategies and discuss our approach to data collection and analysis to validate and refine these design hypotheses.

Authors

• Blair Justin Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Joshua Littenberg-Tobias, GBH