Autor: Ingrid Dethloff

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Justice MOOC – Conclusion

Today I finished the HarvardX Justice MOOC on edX with the final exam. There was no time limit for the test, however, after the first half, I got timed-out and had to log in again and continue, which was irritating as I didn’t know what would happen once I had left the web form. In the end, the result was very successful and I am looking forward to getting my certificate after July 15th.

The course felt like a long time period (12 weeks) – I actually prefer MOOCs with about 4-6 weeks. However, the incentive of the course certificate was very strong for me – and certificate in context of this course meant doing the final exam. In order to do that, it was necessary to engage with the content of 24 lectures (each about 25 minutes), at least that’s what I thought and prepared to do accordingly. The topic „What’s the right thing to do“ was very interesting up to the end of the course and the 24 self tests and 5 graded quizzes during the course were very helpful. I really liked the course structure with 2 poll questions every week and the subsequent challenges – you got a live feeling and it helped to trigger short forum entries discussing pros and cons. I’ve scrolled through many forum posts and was reminded once again, that the (cultural) diversity of the participants is always a big factor in MOOCs. You don’t get that in closed environments. And moral reasonings and questions about political theory naturally differ a lot between different countries and cultures.
In this course I got a better understanding of distributive justice and indeed, it influenced my way of thinking: „Once the familiar turns strange, once we begin to reflect our circumstances, it’s never quite the same again“. It would have been nice to have a live session with Prof. Sandel, but that was apparently limited to the first run of the MOOC last year.

It’s my second MOOC which I officially completed, and it was very different from the cMOOC „Moodle MOOC on WizIQ“ in June 2013. The Moodle MOOC focussed on letting the participants produce digital artifacts, discussing and sharing (accompanied by many live sessions with learning experts) whereas the Justice MOOC was about learning a lot of predefined content (video lectures) and reflecting about theories. In my opinion, both didactical concepts were very good and fitting for the particular purpose.

I have taken many, many MOOCs in the last years, obviously only a small part of them with the official stamp of completion. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t like some of the other ones or that I failed there. On the contrary, I learned a lot by attending live sessions, reading some of the literature and taking part in discussions. Certificates may be a nice incentive, but if you don’t need a certificate, why should you go the extra way? I think the aspect of the MOOC completion rate as a general success factor is heavily overrated – eventually MOOCs are open for everyone and shouldn’t come with too many restrictions (you have to do this and you have to do that until [date] otherwise you get drawbacks etc.). I also think we should appreciate the „quiet“ MOOC participants who learn their own way and don’t like to express themselves like some others do in many, many forum posts (for me, the term „lurkers“ is a very disrespectful one).
In conclusion, it is very important to define in advance what a MOOC is about, the workload, expectations and the paths (and level of participation) a learner might take. A short survey at the beginning (including the option „just checking out this MOOC“) and a short midterm survey won’t hurt.

(Update 21.7.14)

And that’s my certificate:
Justice Certificate Thumbnail

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Justice MOOC – Midterm

It has been some time since I enrolled in the Justice MOOC and it is still going well for me. I have learned a lot about utilitarianism and libertarianism – in a way which is relevant for today’s life. Two evenings a week (that’s about 3hours/week) I spend with the topics of moral and political philosophy offered in the course. It is something I actually look forward to and has become a certain routine: Watching the two lectures, writing down the main ideas for me, taking the polls and the self-tests, reading parts of the discussion. I already did 3 of the 5 graded quizzes – I am curious, if I stand a chance in the final exam (coming up June 24). The lectures are quite fascinating: in terms one can understand, with many examples from literature and legal cases, issues of our time and often in discussion with the students. There are many different ways to record lectures, and this one where you get to see the audience a lot, not only transfers the atmosphere but is an important part of the content.
As I am very satisfied with the course, in the mid-course survey I could „strongly agree“ (in a positive meaning) with questions regarding workload, learning activities, support, segmentation and the degree of difficulty of the course.
What happens next? Lecture 15 „John Rawls: The case for equality“ is coming up on Tuesday

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Justice MOOC

Last year, I took many MOOCs on different platforms, MOOCs with very different didactical approaches and I had a short look at the first Justice MOOC on edX when it was already finished. At the time, I was more interested in looking at the structure of edX courses, however I was very impressed with the topic and lecturer. When the famous Harvard course started again as a MOOC in April 2014, I decided to really engage with it. I had to catch up this week with lectures 1 to 4, but maybe this is a good thing because I got deep into the topic.
The pre-course survey asked about English skills and I think, this is a very good aspect because I realized that my combination of being „not at all familiar“ with moral reasoning and not being a native speaker was challenging when answering the self-tests and graded quiz questions. In other MOOCs it wasn’t necessary to weigh every word and meaning in order to differentiate between options. As for philosophy, Sandel said „once the familiar turns strange, it’s never quite the same again“. I like the course concept / structure very much: starting with the video lectures, answering the polls and rethinking the answers when an additional factor appears in the setting. For me, the recording conveys the atmosphere in the Sanders Theatre and that is exactly what a MOOC provider could wish for.
There are many benefits in being an e-learning professional, one of them is you get to know many different people, cultures and topics – and this time a glance at „What’s the right thing to do?“.

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Session 3 – Employers

The session on September 23th focussed on employers and badges. It started with the „Digital Badges“ YouTube video of CGI America 2013 (Clinton Global Initiative). After an intro from Anne Derryberry we heard Pamela Tate from CAEL and Jennifer McNelly from „The Manufacturing Institute“.

There was much discussion in the text chat and the session was very interesting for me, as I hadn’t heard about either organization before. The video was about a commitment announcement for digital badges and Bill Clinton supporting digital badges saying that „we must embrace a more modern and comprehensive credentialling system“.
Anne Derryberry suggested that employers are in the very early phase of early adopters regarding badges. Employers were said to have difficulty filling jobs and to identify qualified new hires – could badges be an answer for this?
CAEL’s (Council for Adult and Experiential Learning) vision was cited as „Meaningful learning, credentials and work for every adult“ and Pamela Tate spoke about badges as microcredentials, „LearningCounts“ portfolios as a platform of choice for badges, the employer lens (recruitment, retention, mobility, engagement of employees) and Prior Learning Assessment for filling the skills gap: We should ask ourselves what employers would find useful and how we can bring together the options which are already there. „If employers don’t accept them and they don’t help people get better jobs, then will people use these on a widespread basis?“ „Someone has to certify that you know it and it has to matter to somebody“. I can agree to that.

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Badges – What did I learn until now in the OpenBadgesMOOC?

We got many literature links – some of them I put in the Delicious-Account. I was very impressed by the article „Genealogy of Badges“ by Alex Halavais – „badge“ may be a term with a whole lot of different meanings when you talk about it with different people. I also read some Higher Ed articles, but I don’t feel that it was what I was looking for.

Instead I focussed on something else. We heard a lot about the advantages of badges for learners until now, and I was curious how you could show your badges to others once you had earned them. So I created an account at mozilla backpack and tried to upload some badges I’d earned in a prior MOOC. I was lucky that I still had access to the prior MOOC platform and could download the badges (because at the time I didn’t pay much attention to badges and didn’t even download them). Once I uploaded them on mozilla backpack and put one in a collection to share (example 1), I was suprised that the website gave no sign of my name and I had to write instead something meaningful after clicking on „Edit this page“. So far so good. You could click on the criteria or evidence link and still didn’t get the information of my name. When I talked about badges with a colleague of mine the next day, he told me that my badge png file which was shown on the page contained kind of sensitive personal information which you could easily access just by putting the png file in the Windows text editor. And finally there was my name in it. Therefore, I got the strange feeling that normally you wouldn’t know what’s in the badge you’ve earned because the mozilla backpack display doesn’t offer this information but that everyone could download just the png and easily look into the complex metadata. The badges I’d tested were technically issued via a Moodle platform and I was curious if other badges looked and behaved differently.
My colleague told me of an easy way to get a badge for reading a paper about open badges and so I tried this one. This was totally different because I couldn’t download a png but just put it in my backpack via the issuing server. This png file didn’t contain any metadata, at least not in the image file (example 2).

Today I started as a participant in a German management MOOC and all the participants who had enrolled got a participant badge we could download as a png file. I was glad to have another test object, but then I was surprised that mozilla backpack didn’t accept it and instead gave the error message „Image does not have any baked in data.“ (so there is no example 3)

My tests with only three different badge issuers and three totally different results (which were all not so satisfying) left me with the first impression that there is much work to do.

When I logged into the Open Badges MOOC platform some minutes ago, I saw a new announcement about getting help with making badges and something about participant badges (another test object for me?) – this could be interesting. And I’ve still got to write my first forum entry. After I had realized that the badge challenge acitivities were beyond me (as I haven’t plans to implement a badge system) and on the other hand I knew too little about badges to write forum posts, I missed writing something in each of my group introduction forums. So that’s one task for tomorrow.