The future of learning?
A new model of online learning could give museums a major role as content providers to higher education for a mass audience. Julie Nightingale reports
Having been carefully excavated from beneath a Leicester car park after five centuries in the earth, the bones of Richard III will be at the centre of another groundbreaking development this month.
The last Plantagenet monarch is the focus of Leicester University’s first massive open online course (mooc) – a short higher education programme in which teaching and learning is exclusively online and open to all-comers for free.
The six-week course, a partnership with the Open University’s FutureLearn platform, draws on the excavation research plus archaeological, historical, art historical and literary expertise from across the university to explore England in the king’s time.
Video lectures, tutorials via social media, online discussion forums and, potentially, an interactive investigation of the remains could all be part of the mix.
The format sounds like any university short course but moocs differ significantly from what has gone before. The number of participants is theoretically limitless and global.
Social media is used for live streaming of lectures, discussion forums and tutor feedback. Peer-to-peer marking means that aspect of the teaching workload is shouldered by students, not tutors. Most significantly, moocs are free, for now at least, with the costs absorbed by the institutions and their partners.
Rapid expansion
In the US and other parts of the world, moocs have expanded rapidly with museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Moma) offering them.
The Leicester mooc is one of a UK wave being unveiled in the next few months. Supporters say that this will start to transform the way UK higher education is organised and accessed. Significantly, museums, archives and other holders of historical collections are being seen as key sources of content and expertise, with a number already involved.
The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is working with the US-based higher education consortium Coursera on a mooc that will explore the work of Andy Warhol.
This will analyse the research into Warhol under Artist Rooms, the collection of modern and contemporary art owned jointly by NGS and Tate that was established through Anthony d’Offay’s donation in 2008. The British Museum and British Library are also working on moocs with higher education bodies.
Marketing opportunity
As providers of content and expertise, at least some of which is already digitised, museums represent a rich resource for any learning provider but this new digital platform could enable them to share that knowledge with a bigger swathe of the population.
Nick Poole, chief executive of the Collections Trust, is an enthusiast who says moocs present an audience development and a marketing opportunity for museums.
“The core purpose of most museums is educational and we ought, therefore, to be excited about taking advantage of any channels which allow us to explore that role,” he says. “At the moment, moocs seem to offer a potential to reach an entirely different audience in a different way.”
At a time when museums have to work hard to justify their existence, demonstrating a willingness and an ability to be involved in widening access to learning is a wise move in policy terms, he adds.
Others are more cautious, wondering whether moocs are a fad rather than an innovation and unsure about the idea of handing over collections and research to be used on a platform that is not wholly controlled by the museum. There are also practical concerns about the staff time and the costs of creating new text, video, audio and other online content for use in a mooc.
Tate has explored participating in a mooc and decided, for the moment, not to go ahead (although it is loosely involved in the Artist Rooms mooc).
The fear is that the commitment a mooc would demand in teaching time for staff and the costs of digitising materials would be too great, says Rosie Cardiff, Tate’s e-learning editor. But there was also doubt about how a mooc would support Tate’s mission.
Who’s using moocs?
“We had some qualms about the audience that moocs reach,” Cardiff says. “In the research that has been done around the profile of the moocs student, they are generally very well educated to begin with. A majority have degrees, some even have doctorates so they are not the hard-to-reach, whereas our learning team is more geared to trying to reach those audiences.”
Her own experience of learning via a mooc seemed to bear out this view. She took part in a digital cultures mooc with the University of Edinburgh, a five-week course of video lectures, reading material and live online discussions with tutors and other learners.
Students were set an assignment to produce a digital artefact (Cardiff produced a board on the social media site Pinterest) and assessment was done through peer review by three other mooc students. Those who completed the course received a certificate of accomplishment.
“I found it very interesting,” Cardiff says. “They linked to lots of video material on YouTube and then tried to make a lot more of the discussion and activity on social media, so it was distributed through all kinds of different platforms. That was in some ways overwhelming but in other ways quite exciting.
"It only lasted five weeks but it was quite intensive. Every week there was something you were meant to be doing or responding to and there was a Google Hang-out every two weeks where the tutors picked up on some of the themes.”
The mooc was open to anyone but Cardiff’s impression was that many of her fellow students were teachers, had roles in education or were interested in learning.
“They were quite engaged so it felt like you were communicating with people who were fairly similar.”
Richard III mooc
Another fear expressed by some in the sector is that widening online access to rich digital content in ever-more sophisticated ways will ultimately lead to a decline in real visitors, although this argument is swiftly rebutted by Maja Maricevic, the head of higher education at the British Library.
“The fear that it will lead to fewer people through the doors is not an issue for us. We think that the exposure of digital raises the profile of physical and increases requests from users. We are also certain, as we’ve seen it outside of moocs, that the discovery of material in digital channels means they are more likely to want to engage with the physical material,” Maricevic says.
If moocs present an opportunity for museums to expand their educational reach to new audiences, what do they mean for the profession’s own learning needs?
At Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, where half of the students on the MA programme are distance learners who continue to work while studying, they are watching closely what happens with the Richard III mooc and the implications it could have for learning and pedagogy.
Passive learning?
Lecturer Ross Parry says that moocs have the potential to add another layer to the department’s existing programme but that it’s not yet clear whether online-only learning will work for the museum profession or any other.
“I’m excited about what online delivery could do but I also know that our distance learning programmes have typically been a blend of face-to-face, summer school residential and tutors at the end of a telephone or email,” he says.
“We’ve never just parked digital content on a website and expected learning to happen exclusively on a screen.”
As Parry suggests, the idea of learning as a passive screen-based experience is unattractive because it’s in the interaction – with objects, with people – that the real joy of learning resides. But one of the key selling points of moocs is that they enable interaction of a type and on a scale that was never possible before.
Whether museums can build the necessary partnerships, tackle the creation of new digital content, overcome the copyright issues and pay for it all is another matter. But if the experience of the US is anything to go by, this is no passing fad.
Content Moocs can use a museum’s own digital content, incorporate existing content from platforms such as YouTube or new content may need to be created.
Curators or content creators? Beth Harris, who pioneered the digital education programme at the Museum of Modern Art and is now dean of art and history with educational website the Khan Academy, argues that curators and educators could embrace a new role as content curators by using simple tools such as handheld microphones and recording software GarageBand. Writing on the SmartHistory blog, Harris says: “We have run workshops with curators, educators, conservators and docents and found that while the media produced by a content expert may not be as polished as a scripted video produced by professional videographers, it can be far more engaging.”
Collaboration This is key. Working with universities as part of a consortia, such as Coursera and FutureLearn, provides the necessary quality assurance for a mooc in terms of teaching and assessment.
Subject There are plenty of moocs devoted to traditional academic topics but the Leicester experiment shows that learning programmes could also be framed around a topical discovery or event.
Social media We’ve all heard of Facebook but what about Tumblr, Google Hang-outs and Pinterest? Social media is an ever-expanding realm and provides a free infrastructure for interactive discussion, feedback and sharing of ideas and content.
Copyright Securing permission to use library content in a mooc demands careful navigation of the copyright conditions. The British Library, for example, owns full copyright of some of the materials it holds but not all. For some it has the right to make the materials available to the public for research but not to reproduce them for wider use. Would a mooc count as research or not?
The last Plantagenet monarch is the focus of Leicester University’s first massive open online course (mooc) – a short higher education programme in which teaching and learning is exclusively online and open to all-comers for free.
The six-week course, a partnership with the Open University’s FutureLearn platform, draws on the excavation research plus archaeological, historical, art historical and literary expertise from across the university to explore England in the king’s time.
Video lectures, tutorials via social media, online discussion forums and, potentially, an interactive investigation of the remains could all be part of the mix.
The format sounds like any university short course but moocs differ significantly from what has gone before. The number of participants is theoretically limitless and global.
Social media is used for live streaming of lectures, discussion forums and tutor feedback. Peer-to-peer marking means that aspect of the teaching workload is shouldered by students, not tutors. Most significantly, moocs are free, for now at least, with the costs absorbed by the institutions and their partners.
Rapid expansion
In the US and other parts of the world, moocs have expanded rapidly with museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (Moma) offering them.
The Leicester mooc is one of a UK wave being unveiled in the next few months. Supporters say that this will start to transform the way UK higher education is organised and accessed. Significantly, museums, archives and other holders of historical collections are being seen as key sources of content and expertise, with a number already involved.
The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) is working with the US-based higher education consortium Coursera on a mooc that will explore the work of Andy Warhol.
This will analyse the research into Warhol under Artist Rooms, the collection of modern and contemporary art owned jointly by NGS and Tate that was established through Anthony d’Offay’s donation in 2008. The British Museum and British Library are also working on moocs with higher education bodies.
Marketing opportunity
As providers of content and expertise, at least some of which is already digitised, museums represent a rich resource for any learning provider but this new digital platform could enable them to share that knowledge with a bigger swathe of the population.
Nick Poole, chief executive of the Collections Trust, is an enthusiast who says moocs present an audience development and a marketing opportunity for museums.
“The core purpose of most museums is educational and we ought, therefore, to be excited about taking advantage of any channels which allow us to explore that role,” he says. “At the moment, moocs seem to offer a potential to reach an entirely different audience in a different way.”
At a time when museums have to work hard to justify their existence, demonstrating a willingness and an ability to be involved in widening access to learning is a wise move in policy terms, he adds.
Others are more cautious, wondering whether moocs are a fad rather than an innovation and unsure about the idea of handing over collections and research to be used on a platform that is not wholly controlled by the museum. There are also practical concerns about the staff time and the costs of creating new text, video, audio and other online content for use in a mooc.
Tate has explored participating in a mooc and decided, for the moment, not to go ahead (although it is loosely involved in the Artist Rooms mooc).
The fear is that the commitment a mooc would demand in teaching time for staff and the costs of digitising materials would be too great, says Rosie Cardiff, Tate’s e-learning editor. But there was also doubt about how a mooc would support Tate’s mission.
Who’s using moocs?
“We had some qualms about the audience that moocs reach,” Cardiff says. “In the research that has been done around the profile of the moocs student, they are generally very well educated to begin with. A majority have degrees, some even have doctorates so they are not the hard-to-reach, whereas our learning team is more geared to trying to reach those audiences.”
Her own experience of learning via a mooc seemed to bear out this view. She took part in a digital cultures mooc with the University of Edinburgh, a five-week course of video lectures, reading material and live online discussions with tutors and other learners.
Students were set an assignment to produce a digital artefact (Cardiff produced a board on the social media site Pinterest) and assessment was done through peer review by three other mooc students. Those who completed the course received a certificate of accomplishment.
“I found it very interesting,” Cardiff says. “They linked to lots of video material on YouTube and then tried to make a lot more of the discussion and activity on social media, so it was distributed through all kinds of different platforms. That was in some ways overwhelming but in other ways quite exciting.
"It only lasted five weeks but it was quite intensive. Every week there was something you were meant to be doing or responding to and there was a Google Hang-out every two weeks where the tutors picked up on some of the themes.”
The mooc was open to anyone but Cardiff’s impression was that many of her fellow students were teachers, had roles in education or were interested in learning.
“They were quite engaged so it felt like you were communicating with people who were fairly similar.”
Richard III mooc
Another fear expressed by some in the sector is that widening online access to rich digital content in ever-more sophisticated ways will ultimately lead to a decline in real visitors, although this argument is swiftly rebutted by Maja Maricevic, the head of higher education at the British Library.
“The fear that it will lead to fewer people through the doors is not an issue for us. We think that the exposure of digital raises the profile of physical and increases requests from users. We are also certain, as we’ve seen it outside of moocs, that the discovery of material in digital channels means they are more likely to want to engage with the physical material,” Maricevic says.
If moocs present an opportunity for museums to expand their educational reach to new audiences, what do they mean for the profession’s own learning needs?
At Leicester’s School of Museum Studies, where half of the students on the MA programme are distance learners who continue to work while studying, they are watching closely what happens with the Richard III mooc and the implications it could have for learning and pedagogy.
Passive learning?
Lecturer Ross Parry says that moocs have the potential to add another layer to the department’s existing programme but that it’s not yet clear whether online-only learning will work for the museum profession or any other.
“I’m excited about what online delivery could do but I also know that our distance learning programmes have typically been a blend of face-to-face, summer school residential and tutors at the end of a telephone or email,” he says.
“We’ve never just parked digital content on a website and expected learning to happen exclusively on a screen.”
As Parry suggests, the idea of learning as a passive screen-based experience is unattractive because it’s in the interaction – with objects, with people – that the real joy of learning resides. But one of the key selling points of moocs is that they enable interaction of a type and on a scale that was never possible before.
Whether museums can build the necessary partnerships, tackle the creation of new digital content, overcome the copyright issues and pay for it all is another matter. But if the experience of the US is anything to go by, this is no passing fad.
Open online: your mooc checklist
Content Moocs can use a museum’s own digital content, incorporate existing content from platforms such as YouTube or new content may need to be created.
Curators or content creators? Beth Harris, who pioneered the digital education programme at the Museum of Modern Art and is now dean of art and history with educational website the Khan Academy, argues that curators and educators could embrace a new role as content curators by using simple tools such as handheld microphones and recording software GarageBand. Writing on the SmartHistory blog, Harris says: “We have run workshops with curators, educators, conservators and docents and found that while the media produced by a content expert may not be as polished as a scripted video produced by professional videographers, it can be far more engaging.”
Collaboration This is key. Working with universities as part of a consortia, such as Coursera and FutureLearn, provides the necessary quality assurance for a mooc in terms of teaching and assessment.
Subject There are plenty of moocs devoted to traditional academic topics but the Leicester experiment shows that learning programmes could also be framed around a topical discovery or event.
Social media We’ve all heard of Facebook but what about Tumblr, Google Hang-outs and Pinterest? Social media is an ever-expanding realm and provides a free infrastructure for interactive discussion, feedback and sharing of ideas and content.
Copyright Securing permission to use library content in a mooc demands careful navigation of the copyright conditions. The British Library, for example, owns full copyright of some of the materials it holds but not all. For some it has the right to make the materials available to the public for research but not to reproduce them for wider use. Would a mooc count as research or not?
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