Mentored open online communities (MooCs) as a third space for teaching and learning in higher education
Citation
Pet, Sue Ringler; Silvestri, Katarina; Loomis, Stephanie; O’Byrne, W. Ian; Kist, William. (2017) Mentored open online communities (MooCs) as a third space for teaching and learning in higher education. In MOOCs and Higher Education.
Abstract
Online learning environments have been promoted as educational innovations with tremendous potential. Originally framed as massive open online courses (MOOCs), large-scale open online learning experiences have gained significant attention. Often missing from this conversation is the recognition that MOOCs can be implemented in various ways — from traditional instruction that is merely housed online to highly innovative pedagogical approaches. To provide a third space for teaching and learning in higher education institutions, this chapter modifies the original framing of the MOOC to develop a mentored open online community (MooC). This chapter explores a case study of a social media project that evolved around the hashtag #WalkMyWorld and developed into this alternative type of online learning experience, in which participants could communicate, socialise, and learn in a flexible, open environment.
Notes
The #WalkMyWorld project was never supposed to be a MOOC — it evolved from a common hashtag and a set of learning events into something that functioned like one. That’s what makes this chapter interesting to me. We didn’t set out to build an open online course. We set out to connect educators around a creative, multimodal practice, and the community grew in ways we didn’t fully anticipate.
The “mentored” qualifier matters. Standard MOOC discourse focuses on scale and completion rates, which are the wrong metrics for what we were doing. The #WalkMyWorld community wasn’t about throughput; it was about connection — educators from different institutions, different countries, different career stages, finding each other and learning with each other through a shared creative practice.
The third space framing also resonates. WalkMyWorld existed between the formal space of the university course and the informal space of personal social media. It borrowed affordances from both while being constrained by neither. That in-between position was generative, even if it was also occasionally chaotic.