Connective_Knowledge-19May2012 (2)

Stephen Downes 537 Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Typically in a MOOC more content is produced than learners can consume; they are encouraged to select content that is relevant to their own circumstance and by so doing create an individual perspective or point of view on the domain of discourse.

Conversation is also often seeded by the hosting of online sessions with guest participants, typically experts in the field. While these live sessions are attended by a smaller percentage of participants, they result in the production of artifacts that prompt additional discussion.

Quality - OER/OEP How does the institution approach quality in OER? Is there any current indication of a quality concept or process? Does the institution perceive quality from the perspective of the quality of open educational resources or the quality of open educational practice?

How does the institution show quality through OEP versus quality of OEP? What methods, concepts and practices are used to enhance the quality of OEP? There is no filtering or other mechanism directly addressing quality in a MOOC. The design is such that quality materials will be discovered and highlighted by course participants. Quality, in other words, is not determined by experts, it is crowdsourced.

This is an important feature of MOOCs. There is not the presumption that (a) there is a single type of quality that applies to all participants, and (b) that this quality could be recognized by course facilitators. Accordingly, what we observe in a MOOC is that participants will cluster around different types of materials or media - for example, they may cluster around a discussion board, social network site, or virtual world. Quality is then indicated in different ways specific to those environment s(such as the 'Like' button in Facebook).

Additionally, course facilitators do not participated as dispassionate observers or 'coaches'.

Rather, they participate as though they were students, creating resources on an ad hoc basis, highlighting materials they find interesting or useful, and in other ways modeling the practice of quality contributions.

'Quality' in a MOOC is defined not as the exceptional nature of published materials, but rather the richness and utility of conversation and discussions mediated by those artifacts and other activities. Hence, quality is determined post-publication, and even post-distribution, as an emergent property, and not an inherent property of the resource itself.

The most overt quality mechanism is the review of participant feeds. Each feed is reviewed by a facilitator prior to being added to the list of aggregated feeds, as follows: - to ensure the URI submitted for the feed RSS (or Atom, or other supported format) is correct - to ensure the content encoding is correct, and can be understood by the aggregator - to ensure the content is not spam, or irrelevant to course materials Participants also select by overt action the content they want included in the course through the embedding of a course tag (for the current 'Change' MOOC the tag is '#change11') in the title, description or category fields.