The ScHARR MOOCS Diaries: Part X - The cost of developing a MOOC

The cost of developing a MOOC

So by now, we have got the idea that MOOCs are (usually) free for students. But what about the costs of developing them? How much does it cost to create a MOOC? And what benefits (financial and otherwise) do they bring to ScHARR?

By Isabelle Grosjean ZA (Self-published work by ZA)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki
/File%3AMontreGousset001.jpg

The most obvious cost to ScHARR is the amount of staff time that is being devoted to the MOOCs. But what counts as MOOC development time? Some things are obvious- time spent in planning meetings, time spent scripting, setting up and recording audio and video resources for the MOOCs. Other activities are more debatable- if I spend a bus journey to work looking for MOOC-related tweets, and retweeting interesting ones, should this be included in calculations? What about time spent by staff actually studying on other MOOCs? Time spent chatting about MOOCs with University colleagues here in Sheffield? Time spent writing “ScHARR MOOC Diary” blog postings...?

We asked staff members to decide what activities should and should not be included, accepting that the final figures may end up being approximations rather than accurate measurements of time. We then needed a simple process for recording these hours. Rather than recording time on separate activities, we invited staff to keep a note, on a weekly basis, of time spent on “any activity which contributes directly to the development of our 3 MOOCs”. In addition, we made the decision not to keep the 3 MOOCs separate, because so much of the development work has involved all 3 courses, or has been done as one larger group of staff. To make this an open and collaborative process, we set up a google form, with data shared amongst all the MOOC staff- hopefully no-one has felt threatened by sharing details of their input in this way. When it became apparent that it was difficult for all staff to keep the google form up to date, we decided that at our fortnightly MOOC meetings, an iPad would be passed around at the start so people could update their figures then if needed.

Interim figures are shown below- names have been anonymised, although you can see, bottom left, a highlighted table with the contributions thus far of different staff groups. Whilst we would currently treat these figures with some caution (and after this blog is published, I imagine there might be some retrospective updating of the numbers!), the data so far collected suggests that it is the two members of staff leading the forthcoming MOOCs (“Healthy sustainable diets” and “Health Inequalities”) who have put in the most work so far (around 30% each of total number of hours recorded).

Logging the hours

In due course, we will be able to put some figures against the recorded hours, based on staff salaries, and to arrive at an overall figure for developing and running our 3 MOOCs. How closely this corresponds with other estimates remains to be seen. The University of Edinburgh’s MOOCs, run in early 2013 via Coursera, cost an estimated £30,000 from development to delivery whilst  the University of Pennsylvania’s MOOC courses (also developed on behalf of Coursera) cost $50,000 each to develop.

There is plenty of ongoing discussion about the costs and benefits of running MOOCs, and much speculation about different models for monetization. At ScHARR, we will only be able to make an informed comment on these issues once the first courses are complete, and we’ve had a chance to estimate how many MOOC participants converted to postgraduate study at ScHARR, and what value the other benefits- such as the networking opportunities for ScHARR and the impact on our reputation- might have. Nevertheless, we are quietly confident that the investment we are now making will bear financial and educational dividends, for students, staff and ScHARR.

Sign up for the ScHARR MOOCs here.

By Chris Blackmore

ScHARR MOOC Diaries: Part IX: Pressing On - Using press packs to spread the MOOC message

A few months into developing and supporting the ScHARR MOOCs, it has become obvious that the task of promoting MOOCs is an onerous one. We had set out early to build a list of who we should be promoting our courses to on a local, national and international level. Even though we have years of experience and expertise in promoting our courses to our traditional and distance learners, MOOCs are very different in that the entrance level from that of a taught or research masters is lower. MOOCs act as tasters for a topic and a course or be ‘lite’ versions designed especially for those who just want to dip in and out of education and development. So the market for promoting them is, well, massive; anyone from school-age to a pensioner can take our MOOCs and that’s where the marketing focus shifts.

The ScHARR MOOC team have their own personal contact groups and resources they can promote the course, but unlike our established courses there is a need to get the message further afield and with that it means more work, repetition and refinement of where that message is channelled. This is where the press pack comes in handy as with promoting a MOOC there is the need for refinement and repetition which amongst all of the content building, support and meetings means that promoting the courses can be neglected. A press pack allows us to share the course in a quick and simple way by covering the basics of the courses in a way that it can be shared by others without any explicit knowledge.

The pack contains these items:

• Word and PDF one page releases for each of the three courses - their objectives, learning, outcomes, about ScHARR and what a MOOC is, as the purpose of these courses is to reach as far beyond the academic firewalls as possible.
• Colour posters promoting the three courses, one generic and another focused towards the NHS.
• The ScHARR MOOC Business Card
• QR Codes for each course - as with the press releases allowing others to sharealike and help promote the courses within their own organisation.
• A one page ‘copy and paste’ document for adding into message bodies of emails and other communications, with the intention of saving time in writing a welcome for each mailout.

The automation process is not devoid of a human aspect as the majority of communications via Social Media, discussion forums and emails will still remain bespoke communications. Nevertheless it became obvious for our team early on that promoting the MOOCs to larger, sometimes unfamiliar communities required something more than piecemeal communications that had the potential to lack in uniformity and cohesion. The press packs are not exclusively directed at the students, but also those who champion learning in organisations, communication officers, librarians and teachers to name but a few.

By putting in the work now we potentially save time further down the line and have a consistent flow that matches content on our website and the CourseSites platform.

The press packs can be accessed and downloaded here:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5_ESlzUVzmLdllQXzdjLVJCcFE&usp=sharing

The ScHARR MOOC Diaries - Part VIII: Developing a template for structuring weekly MOOC content

'Where MOOCs and online dating sites collide' by Luke Miller

Last week, members of the ScHARR MOOCs team met to decide on how we could best deliver the content for each of our MOOCs. If you have been fortunate enough to participate in a MOOC already, then the chances are you will be aware of the many differing modes of delivery available (see Jenny’s post for more information on xMOOCs vs cMOOCs).

Traditional formats appear commonplace in the current MOOC offering, for example, having delivered content, the course leader will sit behind a desk and discuss some of the concepts and debates raised by MOOC participants that week. Indeed there are approaches which are even more ‘hands-off ‘ than this!

The MOOC mob all agreed that we wanted to be innovative and offer something that would differ from this traditional approach. We wanted to foster a greater degree of interactivity and engagement. The challenge here of course is that like everyone else we don’t have an unlimited resource of tutor time to plough into it.

Recent discourses in online learning have offered a replacement to the concept of the ‘sage on the stage’, and the notion of a ‘guide on the side’ has emerged as one alternative for the role of the tutor in online distance learning.  Again, this notion didn’t quite capture our vision for the dynamic we were hoping to foster with our MOOC participants. We spent some time playing with words which encapsulated our fresh approach to MOOC hosting, and we have arrived at the following mission statement: 'the architects who project, collect, dissect and connect’

To expand on this:

• project (broadcasting / presenting content to stimulate the discussion),
• collect (collating resources, responses and discourse)
• dissect (unpick the discourse and identify the key issues of importance to the subject and our participants)
• connect (we are all about connections - building and fostering links with and between participants and areas of interest to further the subject understanding)

The notion of subject expertise is, for many, becoming less widely held. Certainly, having completed four years of research into a particular field, culminating in a thesis , one is likely to have a greater understanding and knowledge of their specific subject than the average person. However in this age of ‘information overload’ it never fails to amaze me just how informed and engaged the ‘average’ person is on food issues – even if sometimes the information obtained is not so accurate. Combine this with the global context of student populations (we have participants enrolling on our MOOC from all corners of the globe), and the often specific cultural focus of academic research and it soon becomes apparent that as course leaders there is the opportunity for vital information exchange. For a subject area like healthy and sustainable diets, this provides a learning experience  for us as course tutors, but also between our MOOC participants, and could enable new links to be forged, providing a platform to connect interested parties for future research projects.Therefore arguably the research field is developed as our global understanding of how scenarios impact on different communities in different ways is built upon through participant discourse.

So back to our meeting. The big question of how we were going to deliver our content loomed and we talked about the different options, the tools at our disposal and the pedagogical benefits or different avenues. We settled upon a template which we could apply to each MOOC’s weekly content. Having such a template would hopefully mean the students would quickly become orientated with the structure and how to study each week. It also meant that staff working on developing the MOOCs had a ready made mould into which they could poor materials and so on. Being the first MOOC offered by the university, we wanted to keep the outline format as simple as possible, and not commit ourselves to anything we wouldn’t be confident in delivering, or which may overburden our participants. We finally settled on a weekly template, shown below:

Our Weekly template:

We will be presenting weekly content in the following format.

1. First of all the week’s intended learning outcomes will be shared with the participants just to formalise what we’re hoping the achieve during the week.

2. We will then provide a short video (approximately 2 minutes) which will take the form of a talking head from one or more of the MOOC leaders. The video will introduce the key course content for each week, and highlight any other significant tasks or exercises so the participants will know exactly the scope of their week’s learning and what is being expected from them.

3. We will then provide a series of pages of content which will be varied and may include one or more of following:

• Pages of guided reading (either onscreen or by pointing to openly available articles and reports online)
• Screencasts or videos (pointing to resources such as youtube, vimeo, echo360 and screencast-o-matic)
• Weblinks to interesting and relevant website or policy documents etc.
• Opinions from multiple academic staff or subject experts
• Self-assessment questionnaires to check as participants progress through the week that they are understanding.
• Formative “reveal box” activities whereby participants are asked a question and invited to type an answer before being provided with a ‘model’ answer with which they can compare to their own response.
• Images, diagrams and tables of information

4. We will provide weekly topic areas giving participants the opportunity to post reflective blog entries. These will be shared with the cohort. Participants will be encouraged to engage in the ‘community spirit’ by reading and responding to each other’s reflections.

5. A synchronous “live” Blackboard Collaborate session will be scheduled at the end of each week in which the MOOC tutors will present consolidatory slides on the week’s learning, discuss the blog topic area and pull out interesting posts and comments. These sessions will participatory (we will use the chat window for comments during the session) and will also seek to answer any questions that the MOOC team have received during the week and also give a preview of what will be covered in the following week.

6. In addition to the Collaborate session, we will be opening a weekly discussion forum where conversations can be continued outside of the live session. Due to the potential volume of posts in these forums, we will be offering a ‘loose’ moderation style, ie the MOOC team will monitor posts for appropriateness however will not guarantee that tutors will respond to threads.

Alongside all of the above, we will be encouraging participants to engage with the MOOC tutors in tweeting using the hashtags we are associating with the MOOCs. For the diets MOOC we will be using #dietsmooc. The MOOC welcome pages will contain an embedded twitter feed filtering in all tweets which use this hashtag. Participants are welcome to start tweeting amongst themselves prior to the course commencing, and indeed to respond to Tweets posted by course leaders.

All in all this is an exciting prospect for us as course leaders, but also for all our participants who have enrolled on one of the ScHARR MOOCS. The prospect of being part of such an exciting project which combines learning, participation and research all in one is waiting to be embraced, and we encourage everybody to get on board!

Angie and Luke

6 Week Media: What have we learned?

Back in February, Pete blogged about the launch of the 6 Week Media Course, which was devised and led by the Creative Media Team in CiCS, and Charlotte Watts, who is student intern working at the Information Commons.

The course was a new experience for us all; we had a good idea of what (we thought) the content should be, but in terms of administering, delivering and managing a programme like this we were starting from scratch. It's fair to say the administrative tasks of the course took longer than expected, but this is a learning technology blog so I'm not going to bore you with the minutiae of attendance monitoring.

One of the ideas we had was to create a dual purpose Google Site, which would be used extensively during the course. Our plan was to create a repository of information about the course, so timetables, additional resources and session recordings would be hosted here. We used tinyurl.com/6weekmedia to make the site easily memorable and accessible during sessions.

However, we also wanted students to contribute to the site. Students would use the Google Site to blog (using the 'Announcements' page template) about their experiences on the course, and also embed their completed media artefacts. In the first introductory session, students were split into pairs, and assigned a University of Sheffield building to research. Throughout the 6 weeks, students would research and produce media about their assigned buildings.  Students had free reign to tackle any topic they were interested in; subjects included the perceived lack of social space in Jessop West, to uncovering the story behind the Paternoster lift in the Arts Tower.


The introductory session also allowed students to create their own YouTube & Soundcloud accounts. We chose YouTube for video hosting because all University of Sheffield students have a Google Apps account, which makes it very easy to create a channel and start using YouTube. Students and staff who are interested in uploading videos to YouTube can follow the information on this CiCS page. In terms of audio hosting, Soundcloud was used because it's very easy to embed Soundcloud content into a Google Site. Soundcloud has a simple registration procedure (students could sign in with Facebook or Twitter if they wanted too), and it has a 2 hour upload limit - which was plenty for the scope of this course.

There are some gaps in the blog entries on the Google Site, and there are various reasons for that. Unfortunately, some of the students had to drop out of the course. Others had IT issues in the audio editing session, which meant students were not able to successfully edit, upload and embed their finished audio pieces. I am not going to discuss every week here, but you can read Charlotte's evaluation of those specific IT issues, as well as every other session over on the Information Commons blog.




So, what have we learned? Well, there is clearly a demand from students for these type of media production skills. The course was oversubscribed within 4 hours of details being announced, and we had a waiting list. Unfortunately, a significant proportion of students (almost half) were unable to finish the course because they couldn't attend all of the sessions. This highlights the problems when trying to schedule a course that is designed to appeal to all undergraduate students from all faculties; it is nigh on impossible to identify a realistic timetable slot which will suit everyone.


Another factor we had to consider was that the course was part of the Sheffield Graduate Award, and we had to ensure students attended 10 hours of workshops. This would be very easy to manage on a more traditional course, but meant we had to factor in filming / audio recording into our workshop sessions. All of the students managed to do the practical work in the allotted session time, but the course feedback almost unanimously said that students would have preferred more time to do these tasks. This time limitation also means the quality of the finished work isn't as high as we might have hoped for.


One interesting point that came up from our feedback was that students appreciated learning about different aspects of media production, such as copyright regulations and audio editing. I think before the course started, we felt the students would be really keen to learn about video production, but perhaps less enthusiastic about other elements. This was clearly not true, and in fact lots of the students said they would have liked to know about image manipulation and graphic design. This was beyond the scope of this pilot course, but is certainly interesting to consider if this type of course were to be run again.

If we were to run the course again, it would be great to maximise the amount of students we could reach, without dramatically increasing the amount of staff time required. One way of achieving this would be to offer the theoretical elements of the course online, and require the practical work to be done outside of a formal session, in much the same way that a MOOC is structured. This would mean the course wouldn't be able to be part of the Sheffield Graduate Award, as it would be impossible to audit attendance hours.

Additionally, the Google Site would have to be re-evaluated. It may be that for a larger number of participants, another hosting / blog platform may be more suitable. Thinking aloud, the admin time in creating different page level permissions in a single site for a large cohort would be considerable ....

We will let you know what is decided about the future of the course, if you have any experience of running something similar I would love to hear them!

Tom

A day in the life of a learning technologist

When people ask me what I do, I don’t normally tell them I’m a learning technologist since it sounds like one of those euphemistic titles made up by HR departments to make menial jobs sound grander or to describe a job that doesn’t have any real responsibilities. Instead, I tell people ‘I’m a teacher who also helps teachers and students to use technology in the classroom’ and that actually is a pretty good description of what I do. But I still have a nagging feeling that people don’t really understand what I do, they think I’m a computer technician who fixes laptops or - possibly worse - they think I don’t do very much at all. So, in the spirit of helping people to grasp what a learning technologist actually does, here’s a description of all the things I did in one day, Tuesday April 23rd.


8.55: get into work at the English Language Teaching Centre (ELTC) and sit down at my desk. Classes start at 9.15 and there’s often teachers needing help with finding bits of equipment or need help using a particular device. This is really our computer technician’s job, but he’s stretched very thin and is often somewhere else fixing something. A teacher comes in needing video cameras for some recording he’s going to do in class, I help him find them and quickly go over how to use them.

9.05: a teacher in my office wants to watch a video on BBC iplayer on her computer but there are issues with Adobe Flash and it needs to be updated so I log in as admin and update it for her.

9.10: I finally sit down at my desk and turn on my computer. I’m currently the main tutor on an online teacher training course (CELTA) we’re running so I make sure I spend the first ten to fifteen minutes in the morning checking on the course activity and forum posts. There are a couple of forum posts to respond to so I spend ten minutes or so writing those and then reply to a few emails.

9.30: I meet with a teacher to induct him in how to be a tutor for our online writing advisory service. The ELTC offers an online writing advisory service for distance learning students (see this post for more info) and as the service grows, I need to train more teachers in how to use the Google Drive/Docs system we have in place to respond to students’ essays. We sit down in our staffroom with a couple of Chromebooks and go through it together.

10.10: sit back down to deal with a couple more emails but interrupted by a teacher who is in the computer room with her class. One of her students can’t save a document on to his account because he’s reached his storage limit. I go along to see if I can help, realise he’s got loads of audio files taking up space and phone up CICS to get his storage increased. Problem solved.

10.30: earlier in the morning I’d read about a couple of online tools that integrate with Google Drive called Learnly and Video Notes, the first is for providing audio feedback on Google Docs, the second for making notes on You Tube videos. I’m so impressed by Video Notes I decide to create a quick screencast explaining how to use it and embed it in our teacher resource site. Then I write an email letting teachers know where to find it and also mention a few other tech-related news items. 

Our teacher resource site and the screencast embedded

12:00: Later in the afternoon I have an online writing advisory video tutorial with a distance learning student based in Ghana. I need to take a look at the student’s essay before the tutorial so I spend an hour checking through his essay on Google Docs and make some comments.

13.15: a teacher has recorded some videos of students speaking in his class, but now doesn’t know what to do so that the students can see them. I sit with him at his desk and show him how to upload them to his university You Tube account and make the videos unlisted so that only the students can see them.

13.30: lunchtime....

14.15: Time for my online writing advisory appointment, I find an empty classroom, connect with him through Google+ Hangouts and we have a really productive 30-minute chat about his essay. 

The online writing advisory appointment using Google Docs and Hangouts

14.50: a teacher comes to me looking for help with some dictaphones she’s using in class with her students. They’ve recorded themselves speaking but when they play them back, they’re at double speed. We’ve had this problem before so I go down and quickly help adjust the settings so they play back normally.

15.00: break....

15.15: a teacher in our office needs help creating a contact group in Gmail so he can send emails out to the whole class. We sit down at his desk and go through how to do it.

15.30: In the evening two trainees on our CELTA teacher training course will be coming in to teach students and the usual trainer who observes them is absent, so I’m stepping in for today. I need to take a look at their lesson plans and write some comments on them so I spend the next forty-five minutes doing that and also setting up the observation template forms I use when watching them.

16.45: normally at this time I’m getting ready to go home, but today I’m staying later so I make my way down to the classroom to observe the trainees teach. The lesson lasts for 80 minutes (each trainee teaching forty minutes) and when it’s over we spend 30 minutes discussing and reflecting on the lesson.

19.00: finally, time to go home...a longer day than normal and I’m exhausted...

Apart from its unusual length, this is a fairly typical day for me, a mix of online teaching, dealing with technical issues as they crop up, preparing guides and materials for teachers and students and face to face teaching. Now, I’ve got no idea if this is at all representative of what other learning technologists do, I reckon some things here might ring a bell with some of you but I’m sure you have many unique tasks that are relevant only to your department or working situation. In fact I’d be fascinated to know a little bit about your working days and whether you’re involved more on the technical side or the academic side or an even mixture of both. And at least now if someone looks sceptical about your job title, you can point them in the direction of this post and say ‘see, see, it is a real job!’.