STLHE 2015

The affordances between the tools we use to teach, how we learn to teach, and how we teach may not be in sync. For example, the notion of open education has been growing in prominence in higher education but often professional development opportunities to support open pedagogies happen in closed workshops or private online spaces for limited audiences. This session will examine a joint University of British Columbia faculty-staff project that utilized a connectivist Massive Open Online Course (cMOOC) framework for an online workshop on teaching with WordPress, an open technology. The cMOOC format was chosen so the content of the three-week workshop (teaching with an open platform) and the format of the course (open pedagogy) were aligned. Based on the theory of connectivism (Siemens, 2005), cMOOCs focus on the co-creation of curriculum and the development of connections between participants, so that knowledge acquisition and creation can continue even after a course is finished (Sadaatmand & Kumpulainen, 2014). Additionally, the open format allows for a wider participant base, expanding the kinds of experiences, approaches, and ideas included in a course. In this session participants will be introduced to the Teaching with WordPress cMOOC we designed, discuss in groups what benefits/drawbacks they can see to opening up professional development in this way, and brainstorm other ways to extend the reach and value of educational development. Participants can expect to leave with an understanding of cMOOCs as well as ideas for how they might open up professional development at their institutions.

References

Jobe, W., Östlund, C. and Svensson, L. (2014). MOOCs for Professional Teacher Development. In M. Searson & M. Ochoa (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education Conference 2014. Chesapeake, VA: AACE. Retrieved from https://oerknowledgecloud.org/sites/oerknowledgecloud.org/files/proceeding_130997%20%283%29.pdf

Saadatmand, M., & Kumpulainen, K. (2014). Participants’ perceptions of learning and networking in connectivist MOOCs. Journal of Online Learning & Teaching, 10(1), 16-30. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol10no1/saadatmand_0314.pdf

Siemens, G. (2005). Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. Instructional Technology and Distance Education, 2(1), 3–10. Retrieved from http://itdl.org/journal/jan_05/article01.htm