EMMOCs2017: A personal narrative (by Luis Vela)

My name is Luis Vela. I volunteered to help with the logistics behind the successfully held EMOOCs2017 and OpenEdX congresses in Madrid last week (22nd - 26th of May 2017). As a volunteer, my tasks ranged from the menial water-supply guy to the more complex and exhilarating ones like placing names in name-holders.

Jokes aside, I had plenty of things to do in my job but they were not what you might say -hard-. In fact, I had plenty of time to pay attention to the lectures and keynote speakers myself. Although they all belonged to the same topic - Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCS - the specific focus ranged in a broad spectrum of interesting and practical concepts. I want to tell the story of a particular workshop that caught my attention: “Workshop No. 3: MOOC Design Method”.

It was nine-thirty in the morning, it was also Thursday. About 35 people gathered at the top library floor. I was disoriented and felt completely misplaced: I didn’t know anybody there, I didn't know where to sit, I couldn't make sense of what the two lovely Dutch girls were saying. They seemed to be rising their hands (in protest?), they wanted something from us - from me -, they were saying things in English but my brain had been without coffee for too many hours now. Delirium Tremens! - I thought. My confused and sleepy brain finally switched on and like a mirage, the image of everybody waiting for me to be silent appeared to me. I immediately proceeded to close my yawning mouth and shushed. The Dutch girls had ambitious plans for us that day, I was going to radically change my image of MOOCs that morning, I just didn't know about it yet. 

I had decided to come to this particular workshop because rumours about MOOCs had been running around the Physics Department at UC3M. A few months ago, back when snow decided to fall in the middle of spring and all the PhD students gathered together in the canteen for our daily lunch, one of us brought up the topic of MOOCs. Mixed up with his usual myriad of rancid Japanese references he proudly announced his “Initiation to Physics” course was going to be recorded, edited and soon enough they will be online and available to all the students in the University. They could take his classes whenever they wanted wherever they pleased - I couldn't get my head around this, and to be honest with you, it was not my proudest moment and I felt a little envious about it: He was leaving a long-lasting footprint on the education of scientists to come and although I was creating knowledge with my research, it was not being disseminated pass my supervisor and a few articles in overly specialised magazines. He was the one making a real and tangible contribution, not me. This thought found in my brain the perfect niche to safely cocoon and begin metamorphosing. It was not until a few weeks later, when the time to enlist as a volunteer presented, that the idea finally emerged.

When I saw the call for applications, it hit me. I had in front of me the perfect tool to learn for myself how to do that which my friend had done in spring. In my naive head making a MOOC from scratch couldn't be too difficult, after all, it's simply a regular class by a regular professor with slight changes in the way students access it. Basically, I thought, it's simply a matter of scripting the classes, patching them up, honing them, and finally scaling them up. Easy-peasy, right? --- wrong. 

In fact, I was making the mistake most people do when it comes to adapting to this new technology: I only thought about the content of the MOOC when in fact I should have been paying a whole lot more attention to that which I have been regarding as mere details: "lower-case-logistics" as I used to call them...

The Dutch girls divided us into 6 groups and made sure each group contained both experts and newcomers like me. My group had 6 members in it: Three of us were “real” experts in MOOCS, they were the heads of the e-Learning divisions in their own Universities, they had personally coordinated the creation of many MOOCs in the past and were reservoirs of knowledge. The two other people at the table were also experts, but this time, in fields related to innovative techniques in education but not specifically MOOCs. This meant I was sitting next to the some of the biggest fish out there and I was the new kid on the block. I set my mind on squeezing as much knowledge as I could from this workshop.

The workshop revolved around the concept of having (or not) a design session prior to anything else. You see, in my head, it was all a matter of getting a camera running, a few microphones and an empty classroom --- I wasn't going to lose time, I would start filming from day one!. As you can probably guess, I was really sceptic about the whole the idea of having this "design session" since at the end of the day the content is what really matters in a MOOC, isn’t it?.

The purpose of the design session turned out to be the simplest thing there is: get all the people involved with the MOOC on-board. At this point I thought the workshop was going to be completely useless - this is obvious, I thought-  they were stating the obvious and giving it a nice name (so common in marketing strategies nowadays, disgusting...) and expect to make a whole workshop out of that scam. I felt quite disappointed and even though about leaving the classroom and be useful to my friends with their extenuating water-supply or name-tagging responsibilities. Luckily, I didn’t. 

The Dutch ladies didn’t tell us who they meant by everybody involved; In fact, they asked every group to come up with a list of people who should assist the workshop. “Teacher and camera-man” - I said aloud with an uninterested, cool, and a little pretentious voice. My mates didn't react to it, said nothing for a while and a solid silence run rampant between us.....I'd nailed it. 

Silences come in many flavours. Some silences are full of expectation, they are created by a sudden change in the line of thought and nobody dares to break it, nobody dares to disrupt that state of revelation. Other silences simply germinate out of boredom and needlessness to state the obvious. Well, the silence that followed my exclamation was of the later nature…

Everybody knew these were necessary ingredients to create a MOOC, but their vision of Open Education went far beyond mine, and the suggestions they made really made me aware of the rich possibilities I had in front of me to create the ultimate teaching experience. They made me realise the importance of considering, at all times, the kind of audience you will have for example - that's why they strongly recommended the presence of student representatives in the design session. They suggested the presence of somebody who has mastered all the features of the specific platform where our MOOC was going to be uploaded to - you see, although Coursera and OpenEdX both offer videos, online quizzes, forums and so on, other platforms offer yet more resources when it comes to educational tools, like dynamic-plots where you follow the teacher through the construction of a graph...pretty cool, I know. Apparently, seeing the whole process of plotting the axes, or identifying features on the graphs get a long way in making the learning experience better - something I didn't know. As a countermeasure, however, some "local" engineers would keep our expectations in check. You see, if you don't have special microphones and special cameras, you can't shoot scenes of your MOOCs in Antarctica or on the greater of the Kilauea volcano - the job these ‘local’ engineers had was to limit our ambitions and mould them to the size of the studio at hand: A Reality Check.

Ten seconds before the “share your answers” round, somebody also mentioned the importance of designating a project coordinator, whose only job was to be aware of the overall progress of the project and follow the guidelines as close as possible to the one being defined here and now - I nodded in agreement and we added a Project Manager to the list of people who MUST assist to the design session.

After sharing our answers with the other five groups, I realised how close our answers had been. This was a humbling experience: Everybody who had made a MOOC in the past agreed that a “Teacher and Cameraman” was not only insufficient, but it would basically lead to a failed MOOC  where not many students attend and an even a smaller fraction of them effectively receive valuable knowledge. At this point, I closed my mouth and decided that listening to what they had to say was way more valuable that any preconceived thought I had up to that moment.

Once the list of attendees to this hypothetical design session had been created, we were supposed to make a schedule: How the session should run, which things needed to be discussed in length and which not. We were getting to the juicy stuff - this was for me at the heart of the MOOC design, however, my mood had changed considerably, I limited myself to listen and take notes of everything being said here. We were given a few minutes to imagine how a three-hour design session would look like. The final elements of the timetable we came up with were:

• Ice break: It's never easy to work among strangers.

• Teaching philosophies: Share your teaching philosophy: Why are you doing this? Let's share our vision.

• Keyword, key concepts needed to be taught: Make sure we work together towards the same end. Let's define that “end”  through key concepts.

• Define hard deadlines: When should the MOOC be available online, and then plan backwards from that.

• Expose teachers to existing MOOCs: First time doing a MOOC? No problem, just look at these examples of successful MOOCS out there. Do you get the flavour of what we are going to do here? - Great!.

• Set syllabus according to bloom’s scale: Alas! Finally, we would get to talk about that precious content of mine...

• Evaluate syllabus distribution: Are we all happy with the previous point? We better be!

• Hands-on technology: Let the teachers see how an oral text sounds like, let them speak to the mics, let them talk to the camera -Maybe a green screen in the back with the Kilauea background? why not! -.

When all the points were ready, we shared them with the rest of the groups. Mind you, I was in charge of reading them aloud, and trust me when I say this, seeing through the back of my eye the nodding heads of the people in the room, including the Dutch girls themselves, as I explained our answer made me completely sure I had started walking in the right direction in everything MOOC-related. 

It was now time to go. Most of the people felt tired, coffee had had its peak effect about two hours ago and it was now running out. I was beginning to gather the few notes I had and to collect my pens when one of my teammates approached me and said in Spanish: 

“Luis! Que tal? Mira, mi nombre es Victor, sho soy Uruguasho. Quedate con mi correo, me gustaria nos quedaramos en contacto. Si queres aprender mas de esto, no dudes en shamarme!. Un gusto he.”

I had made an excellent contact and I couldn't wait for the conferences to be over, to go back to my office and start forging the ideas to bring to life a MOOC of my own…