Open up: Why not?
Quick aside: crash course to blog writing
Akin to many colleagues that have come before me, when seeing this assessment needed to be completed in the style of a blog, my heart sank. From my prior interaction with blogs, it seems to be in order to achieve success you need to demonstrate not only domain expertise and mastery of the English language, but also intelligence, wit and insight, that I was unsure I could profess to attaining. Eek what to do? Anyway I did what all people would do in this situation and googled “crash course to blog writing” and came up with a very useful link with some great pointers that that guided me in the right direction. Right that aside on to the matter in hand…..
Introducing a new profession to healthcare
The University of Manchester runs a course in Clinical Sciences (Bioinformatics), for which I am currently Programme Co-Director. This is a 3 year part-time masters, where our students spend most of their time as trainees within clinical genetics laboratories across the UK. Clinical bioinformaticians have a crucial (albeit less well known) role in the NHS and are responsible for developing the IT infrastructure, servers and bioinformatics workflows that analyse the vast amounts of genomic data generated within clinically genetics laboratories, you can read more on this profession in this article Unlocking genomics in healthcare, pgs 39–41. This profession is still in its infancy and is still something of a mystery to many other healthcare professionals. We, as educators, but also close collaborators with our students wanted to work with this community to introduce this new profession and highlight its importance. So how to achieve this dissemination? We knew we wanted to extend our reach beyond the UK, therefore an online learning method of doing so seemed appropriate. Coincidentally UoM had begun discussions with Futurelearn, a subsidiary of the Open University set up to develop Massive online open courses (MOOCs) and so our journey to create Clinical Bioinformatics: Unlocking genomics in healthcare began.
Diminishing student numbers or playing the long game?
MOOCs came into existence around a decade ago with George Siemens and Stephen Downes opening up the first course of this kind to 2300 learners on connectivism and connective knowledge. In the words of George Siemens:
The numbers of universities offering MOOCs expanded rapidly and the numbers of learners increased dramatically as has the companies providing the platforms to host the MOOCs, including Udacity, edEx, Coursera and FutureLearn, to paraphrase George again:
“If education is grunge, MOOCs became our Nirvana”.
Though some universities have been cautious of treading this path, concerned of perhaps diminishing reputations, devaluing their taught provision or at worst putting themselves out of business. Yet in 2017 the MOOC concept continues to flourish with different models for funding participation now in existence it has become a serious source of income for some providers and even with even the more conservative Oxford University recently announced the development of its first MOOC. Our course as it stands is a closed course accessible only to employees within the NHS, though with pressing demands on increasing student numbers and income a natural choice would be to open the course more widely, thus posing would the MOOC detract from this offer.[AD1] Though in short, we reckoned that the benefits of highlighting the profession and the subsequent interest we hoped to generate from potential future learners that the ‘long-term’ benefits were still attractive.
And so to camera……..
The MOOC’s inception was an intense and a (quite frankly) daunting 6 months of work, developing skills that I had not previously anticipated, eloquently discussed by another learner, including: writing and learning scripts, talking to camera (sometimes unscripted!) videoing in the evenings, and many a weekend writing content to keep us on schedule. You can take a look for yourself at the trailer to see how we did: MOOC trailer. The MOOC was launched in June 2016, with over 5,000 learners joined, in the 3 iterations that we have now run we have now reached 10,000. Of course, as to be expected, not all ‘subscribers’, actually engage and become ‘learners’ though numbers were similar to other Futurelearn courses — so we were not too disheartened!
Live and let Learn
Learning within a Futurelearn course embraces a social constructivist approach, described articulately by Matthew Lynch in his article for the Edvocate. Within our MOOC, case studies and articles are interspersed with quizzes, polls and discussion points to encourage debate and discussion amongst learners. Educators are encouraged to stand back and allow learners to explore their ideas and also answer each other’s queries and learn from discussions with one another.
As Lead educator I have taken an active role in monitoring and contributing to the discussion points when needed, and we’ve had some really great contributions from learners and seen the development of a very positive learning environment where learners are supporting one another, sharing resources, interesting articles and discussions around questions that we’ve posed. There is a fine balance though, learners do also expect some level of support from you as educators (I noted with interest when discussions were not monitored for a few days one or two learners actively commented on this and were not happy).
Positive Openness — and how to achieve this?
Martin Weller our guest lecturer has mused on the concept of positive openness, the problem being that making our educational materials completely open does not necessarily lead to an equity of access for all, learners learn in different ways and require differing levels of support to do so. This struck a chord with me, simply opening our educational materials up does not ensure that they achieve any educational benefit. Not only do we need to make our content free and open to all but we also need to support and nurture learners within their learning journey. We had discussions after the first run that we could continue to run the MOOC with no moderators and let the learners self-support — we decided against this based on negative feedback when moderators (outrageously!) had a day off. Learners did sometimes need some guidance on certain topics and in addition this field is moving so quickly that our ability to comment means we can add in updates/links to articles etc that keep content current. This does raise a more contentious question of what will the on-going support from the University be for MOOCs, though perhaps a topic for my next blog?
There perhaps it wasn’t so bad, until next time…….
