A charmingly naive article taking a common-sense, straightforward approach to asking whether the woefully uniform pedagogies of the more popular Coursera-style MOOCs might actually work. The authors identify the common pedagogies of popular MOOCs then use narrative analysis to see whether there has been empirical research to show whether those pedagogies can work. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that they can. It would have been a huge surprise if they couldn’t. This is a bit like asking whether email can be used to communicate.
I like the way this article is constructed and the methods used. Its biggest contribution is probably the very simple (arguably simplistic) description of the central pedagogies of MOOCs. Its ‘discoveries’ are, however, spurious. The fact that countless millions of people do learn online using some or all of the pedagogical approaches used by MOOCs is plenty evidence enough that their methods can work and it really doesn’t demand narrative analysis to demonstrate this blindingly obvious fact – one for the annals of obvious research, I think. Like all soft technologies, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results. ‘Can work well’ in general does not mean ‘does work well’ in the particular. We know that billions of people have learned well from books, but that does not mean that all books teach well, nor that books are the best way to teach any given subject.
Address of the bookmark: http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4350/3673
