What is in Kelvin's Head?

Listen up! Moocs are the future

17/12/2013
OK listen up. Moocs are the future.

Now before we go any further, let’s get the usual responses out of the way. The usual responses are twofold:
1. What’s a mooc? (Most people)
2. *rolls eyeballs* (lots of academics, including quite a few in my congregation)
Firstly, a mooc is a term used for a new form of education that you engage in online. It stands for Massively Open Online Course. Such things have been around for the last couple of years and there’s a good wikipedia page on the concept.

The basic idea is that you do a course online along with many thousands of other people all at once (massive) which you have easy/free (open) online (online!) access to. It is a way for someone to teach many people. Many, many people. I’ve just finished doing a mooc where a team of three people were attempting to teach 13000 students all around the world.

But why the eyeball-rolling from clever people?

Well, any teacher worth their salt is going to say, “Ah, but wait a minute? Hang on there… what do you mean…. that’s not a learning experience that is equivalent to what I can do in a classroom.”

And you know what? It isn’t.

However, it is here, it is now and it is going to develop in the future all the same.

Now, are you thinking you’ve heard all this before – are you thinking this is just a glorified correspondence course? Sure you are. But this is a bit more than that. Typically in a mooc, you get video lectures or other content to download, maybe on a weekly basis. You work through that stuff and you get online quizzes and exercises that you do along the way. If the course is well designed, you get instant feedback on how you are doing and can go back and review any of the bits that you didn’t understand.

But here’s the thing – it isn’t just you. It is social. There’s a whole bunch of people out there doing the same course as you. And you can get to interact with them on the forums. Indeed, some of the ways that the mooc is assessed may include interaction on the forums. (Cue eyeball rolling from academics who can’t work out that this is the equivalent of giving a mark for interaction in class discussions, which is a relatively common practise in some institutions).

Then, when all is done, you may well have a final piece of work to submit and this will be marked. But hey, how do you mark 13000 pieces of work? Well, if it is not machine markable material (multiple-guess questions) then the mooc method is to get students to peer review. In the mooc I’ve just participated in, we were encouraged to produce a final video and to pass the course you had to, not only submit your own video, but assess three (or more) others.

Then you get your certificate and there is much rejoicing.

Now, here’s where the Eyeball Rollers have started to harumph loudly. “What use is a certificate when no-one qualified has seen the work? Isn’t this the dumb assessing the dumber?”

Well, the truth is, such a certificate is worth precisely nothing in terms of the educative processes that we have been used to.

But get this, moocs are not really about what the certificate is worth. The satisfaction comes from having learned something new. Getting the certificate is just icing on the beans. Yet getting that certificate is oddly fulfilling – it is part of the gamification of learning. You get a certificate, you want another. You unlock a level badge, you go back to try to accomplish the next level.

Anyway at the end of this post is my certificate from the mooc I recently completed. I don’t care what you think about its value – for me it represents a whole bunch of skills that I just learned. It is for a course that was really for school teachers on Blended Learning – that’s about how to mix learning that takes place in an online setting with more traditional face-to-face teaching. I took the course because I want to be able to offer some online courses at St Mary’s as well doing what we already do. It seemed sensible to do the course and also learn from completing the mooc itself.

What does this mean for the church at large – well it means that education needs to get slicker. In the same way that new technology has meant that we need to up our game in religious circles in the way we communicate with people, so we need to do the same with how we teach. That scrappy stapled-together church magazine is a great means of communicating but it does so on two levels. On one level, it communicates to those who have always received it that things are carrying on just the same as ever and even lets them know whether they are on the coffee rota on Sunday. To the more casual reader, however, it probably communicates that you are not terribly professional, have low expectations which will carry forward into worship and that you are desperate for someone to join the coffee rota to try to replace the people who are dying off.

It is the same with education. Sitting around a flipchart with half a dozen people is something that I continue to do. However, increasingly as I do it, I’m aware that the ways in which people learn are changing. Gamification (rewards – yes, sometimes silly little rewards) is here to stay. Blending of online and offline worlds is how people are doing everything from shopping to looking after their health so why shouldn’t that affect how we learn about Things That Matter in church circles? And yes, self directed learning is here to stay.

There’s new technology on offer here. Who knows what we’re going to do with it?

And here’s my certificate, which I’m terribly proud of, can you tell?
blended learning, church, education, mooc, self directed learning

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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