In “Are the Instructors Going to Teach Us Anything?”: Conceptualizing Student and Teacher Roles in the “Rhetorical Composing” MOOC.", Blancato and Iwertz examine the effectiveness of an MOOC (massive open online course) on Rhetoric Composition at the Ohio State and critique the structure of these classes in the way they assign roles to students and teachers, as well as how the perceived agency of the participants affect the way that knowledge is disseminated.
Blancato and Iwertz explain that there are usually two basic modes for MOOC: xMOOC and cMOOC, the former being a set-up where there is a strict instructor-student hierarchy and most of the knowledge is being handed down from the instructor (the expert) to the students, and the latter is where there is more of a discussion between the community of students and they are the primary medium through which knowledge is transmitted. After assessing the questions and needs of students, the conclusion that Blancato and Iwertz come to is that a strict focus on either style isn’t very beneficial to students. Rather, they propose that attention must be paid to the MOOC so that it takes on aspects of both styles. Their reasoning is that when using an xMOOC, students can feel alienated in how much agency they have in the information and knowledge they are receiving, as if they are at a shortcoming of knowledge in comparison to the instructor, and in a cMOOC, students can often feel lost or that they aren’t learning anything without some guidance from an instructor. In a perfect mix of the two, there is ample discussion and collaboration between the students on what they’re learning, but also consolidation and affirmation from the instructor.
I would definitely, definitely recommend this article to my peers, because I think it is a meta-analysis of what we’re doing now in our classroom, just on a smaller scale. I think that it’s important to assess how content and sure we feel about the information we’re receiving and if we believe that the propagation of knowledge in the classroom is sufficient enough to give us a solid understanding of the material we’re consuming. Especially, too, with the rise of the internet phenomenon allowing masses to take college classes from a distance, often not face to face, it’s extremely important to analyze the effectiveness of these classes before there is a potential overhaul to make MOOC’s (and somewhat similar style of classes) the standard mode of teaching rather than the traditional method.
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