10 reasons why I am NOT a Social Constructivist

Educators nod sagely at the mention of ‘social constructivism’ confirming the current orthodoxy in learning theory. To be honest, I’m not even sure that social constructivism is an actual theory, in the sense that it is verified, studied, understood and used as a deep, theoretical platform for action. For most, I sense, it is a simple belief that learning is, well, ‘social’ and ‘constructed’. As collaborative learning is a la mode, the social bit is accepted without much reflection, despite its obvious flaws. Constructivism is trickier but appeals to those with a learner-centric disposition, who have a mental picture of ideas being built in the mind.

Let me say that I am not, and never have been, a social constructivist. My disbelief in social constructivism comes from an examination of the theoretical roots of the social portion of the theory, in Rousseau, Marx, and Marxists such as Gramsci and Althusser, as well as critiques of learning theorists Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner. More specifically, I believe it is inefficient, socially inhibiting, harmful to some types of learners and blocks better theory and practice. Finally, I’ve seen it result in some catastrophically utopian failures, namely Sugata Mitra’s ‘hole-in-the-wall’ project and Negroponte’s Ethiopian farrago.

1. I don’t buy Rousseau (see Rousseau)

 

With Rousseau, we had the rebalancing of learning theory towards the learner, which was good but it may have led to an extreme reliance on naturalism and intrinsic motivation that is hard to apply in the real world. David Hume wrote, “He is plainly mad, after having long been maddish”, and although Rousseau's legacy has been profound, it is problematic. Having encouraged the idea of romantic naturalism and the idea of the noble and good child, that merely needs to be nurtured in the right way through discovery learning, he perhaps paints an over-romantic picture of education as natural development. The Rousseau legacy is the idea that all of our educational ills come from the domineering effect of society and its institutional approach to educational development. If we are allowed to develop naturally, he claims, all will be well. This may be an over-optimistic view of human nature and development, and although not without truth, lacks psychological depth. Emile, as Althusser claimed, now reads like a fictional utopia.

2. I don’t buy Marxism (see Marx, Gramsci, Althusser)

Although Karl Marx wrote little on educational theory, his influence on learning theory and practice has been profound. In The Communist manifesto Marx states that education has a ‘social’ context, which is both direct and indirect, ‘And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society’. It was this idea that underpinned the entire communist world’s view of learning in the 20^th century, especially through Marxist theorists such as Gramsci and Althusser. In Soviet Russia and its satellite states education was remoulded around political aims and when the Cultural Revolution in China between 1949 and 1966 was unleashed, it had devastating consequences, the nadir coming with Pol Pot and the complete eradication of teachers and schools. Interestingly, when it came to re-education, Marxists states reverted to direct, didactic instruction. To this day Marxism, to a degree, persists in educational and learning theory, most notably in Gramsci, Althusser and the ‘social’ constructivism of Piaget, Vygotsky and Bruner.

3. I don’t buy Piaget (see Piaget)

Jean Piaget claimed that cognitive development proceeds in four genetically determined stages, and that they always follow the same order. This theory of child development, he called ‘genetic epistemology’, and it saw the minds of children as very different from those of adults. Importantly, this perception must be taken into account in teaching and learning. Big problem – he got it mostly wrong. His famous four ‘ages and stages’ developmental model has been fairly well demolished. How did he get it so wrong? Well, like Freud, he was no scientist. First, he used his own three children (or others from wealthy, professional families) and not objective or multiple observers to eliminate observational bias. Second, he often repeated a statement if the child’s answer did not conform to his experimental expectation. Third, the data and analysis lacked rigour, making most of his supposed studies next to useless. So, he led children towards the answers he wanted, didn’t isolate the tested variables, used his own children, and was extremely vague on his concepts. What's worrying is the fact that this Piagean view of child development, based on 'ages and stages' is still widely believed, despite being wrong. This leads to misguided teaching methods. Education and training is still soaked in this dated theory. However, on the whole, his sensitivity to age and cognitive development did lead to a more measured and appropriate use of educational techniques that matched the true cognitive capabilities of children.

4. Above all, I don’t buy Vygotsky

Lev Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist, was as influential as any living educational psychologist. In 'Thought and Language' and 'Mind in Society', along with several other texts, he presents a psychology rooted in Marxist social theory and dialectical materialism. Development is a result two phenomena and their interaction, the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’, a sort of early nature and nurture theory.

Ultimately the strength of Vygotsky’s learning theory stands or falls on his social constructivism, the idea that learning is fundamentally a socially mediated and constructed activity. This is a detailed recasting of Marxist theory of social consciousness applied to education. Psychology becomes sociology as all psychological phenomena are seen as social constructs. Mediation is the cardinal idea in his psychology of education, that knowledge is constructed through mediation, yet it is not entirely clear what mediation entails and what he means by the ‘tools’ that we use in mediation. In many contexts, it simply seems like a synonym for discussion between teacher and learner. However he does focus on being aware of the learner’s needs, so that they can ‘construct’ their own learning experience and changes the focus of teaching towards guidance and facilitation, as learners are not so much ‘educated’ by teachers as helped to construct their own learning.

In particular, it was his focus on the role of language, and the way it shapes our learning and thought, that defined his social psychology and learning theory. Behaviour is shaped by the context of a culture and schools reflect that culture. He goes further driving social influence right down to the level of interpersonal interactions. Then even further, as these interpersonal interactions mediate the development of children’s higher mental functions, such as thinking, reasoning, problem solving, memory, and language. Here he took larger dialectical themes and applied them to interpersonal communication and learning.

However, Vygotsky has a pre-Chomsky view of language, where language is acquired entirely from others in a social context. We now know that this is wrong, and that we are, to a degree, hard-wired for the acquisition of language. Much of his observations on how language is acquired and shapes thought is therefore out of date. The role, for example, of ‘inner speech’ in language and thought development is of little real relevance in modern psycholinguistics.

He prescribes a method of instruction that keeps the learner in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), an idea that was neither original to him nor even fully developed in his work. The ZPD is the difference between what the learner knows and what the learner is capable of knowing or doing with mediated assistance. To progress, one must interact with peers who are ahead of the game through social interaction, a dialectical process between learner and peer. Bruner though the concept was contradictory in that you don’t know what don’t yet know. And if it simply means not pushing learners too far through complexity or cognitive overload, then the observation, or concept, seems rather obvious. One could even conclude that Vygotsky’s conclusion about mediation through teaching is false. Teaching, or peer mediation, is not a necessary condition for learning. A great deal is made of social performance being ahead of individual performance in the ZPD but there is no real evidence that this is the case. Bruner, as stated, was to point out the weakness of this idea and replace it with the concept of ‘scaffolding’.

The oft-quoted, rarely read Vygotsky appeals to those who see instruction, and teaching, as a necessary condition for learning and sociologists who see social phenomena as the primary determinant factor in learning. As a pre-Chomsky linguist, his theories of language are dated and much of his thought is rooted in now discredited dialectical materialism. For Vygotsky, psychology becomes sociology as all psychological phenomena are seen as social constructs, so he is firmly in the Marxist tradition of learning theory. One could conclude by saying that Vygostsky has become ‘fashionable’ but not as relevant as his reputation would suggest.

The resurrection of Vygotsky has led to strong beliefs and practices around the role of the teachers and collaborative learning and the belief that social context lies at the heart of educational problems. Here, it is clear that Marxist ‘class consciousness’ is replaced by ‘social consciousness’. We no longer have Marxist ideology shaping education, but we do have the ideas dressed up in sociology and social psychology.

5. Massively inefficient

Critics of social constructivism are rarely heard but the most damning criticism, evidenced by Merill (1997) and many others since, criticise social negotiation as a form of learning, as it quite simply wastes huge amounts of time to achieve collaborative and consensual understanding of what is taken by many to be right in the first place. This leads to massive inefficiencies in learning. Many, if not most, subjects have a body of agreed knowledge and practice that needs to be taught without the inefficiencies of social negotiation. This is not incompatible with an epistemology that sees all knowledge as corrigible, just a recognition, that in education, you need to know things in order to critically appraise them or move towards higher orders of learning and understanding. In addition, social constructivism largely ignores objective measures, such as genetically determined facets of personality, it is often destructive for introverts, as they don’t relish the social pressure. Similarly, for extroverts, who perhaps relish the social contact too much, social learning can disrupt progress for not only for themselves but others.

6. Damages the less privileged

Constructivist theory, even if correct, accelerates learning in the privileged and decelerates learning in the less privileged. Those with good digital literacy, literacy, numeracy and other skills will have the social support, especially at home, to progress in more self-organised environments. Those with less sophisticated social contexts will not have that social support and be abandoned to their fate. This, I believe, is not uncommon in schools. The truth is that much learning, especially in young people, needs to be directed and supported. Deliberate practice, for example, is something well researched but rarely put into practice in our schools and Universities. In fact it is studiously ignored.

7. Ignores power of solitary learning

Much of what we learn in life we learn on our own. At school, I enjoyed homework more than lessons, as I could write essays and study on my own terms. At University I learned almost everything in the quiet of my own room and the library. In corporate life, I relished the opportunity to learn on trains and planes, havens of forced isolation, peace and quiet. To this day I blog a lot and enjoy periods of intense research, reading and writing. It is not that I’ve learned everything in these contexts, only that they go against the idea that all learning needs to be social.

8. Blocks evidence-based practice

Social constructivism, is what Popper would call a ‘universal theory’, in that no matter what criticisms you may throw at it, the response will be that even these criticisms and everything we say and do is a social construct. This is a serious philosophical position and can be defended but only at great cost, the rejection of many other well-established scientific and evidence-based theories. You literally throw the baby, bath water and the bath out, all at the same time. Out goes a great deal of useful linguistic, psychological and learning theory. Out goes any sense of what may be sound knowledge and quick straightforward results. Direct instruction, drill and practice, reinforcement, deliberate practice, memory theory and many other theories and practices are all diminished in stature, even reviled.

9. Utopian constructivism

Sugata Mitra and Nicholas Negroponte have taken social constuctivism to such extremes that they simply parachute shiny objects into foreign cultures and rely on self-organised social behaviour to result in learning. It doesn’t. The hole-in-the-wall experiments did not work and Negroponte’s claims on his Ethiopian experiment are quite simply untruthful. The problem here is the slide from social constructivist beliefs to hopelessly utopian solutions. As Mark Warschauer reports “no studies have reported any measurable increase in student performance outcomes in reading, writing, language, science or math through participation in an OLPC program”.
10. Groupthink
I often ask what people who mention social contsructivism, what it emans to them, and almost universally get vague answers. I then ask for names, and often Vygotsky is mentioned. I then ask what Vygotsky texts they have read. At this point there's often a blank stare - they can rarely mention a title. My point is that social constructivism is itself a social construct, often just a phrase, certainly often a piece of groupthink, rarely thought through. It gets perpetuated in teacher training and many other contentxs as a universal truth - which it is not. It is a theory that on first hearing, flatters teachers as the primary 'mediators' in learning. In other words, it is a function of confirmation bias.

Conclusion

Why am I NOT a social constructivist – ALL OF THE ABOVE.

Part 2: 20 reasons why the Metaverse may not work out as we think it will

Watching Nick Clegg being interviewed by Horaah Hendry of the FT was embarrassing. Two old men with teenage avatars talking to each other was creepy enough but when they back-slapped each other about being anti-Establishment, it all got a bit arse about facebook. This was facebook PR puff, not journalism. The awkward, missed fist-bump and Clegg holding and drinking an invisible coffee cup, all added to the Pythonesque weirdness. This nonsense aside, we do need to ask some serious questions about this proposition - the Metaverse.

Baudrillard, the prophet of such simulated worlds and their effects on humanity, sees such worlds as being more than extensions of humanity. They capture our attention and hold us hostage. As the world has become de-anchored as God's creation, we began to build our own worlds. It is not yet clear where all of this is going, or more accurately, taking us.

I have been involved with VR for some years, had both the early Oculus kits, written tons about virtual worlds and demonstrated it to many hundreds of people all over the world, including Africa. I have a whole chapter on this in my book Learning Experience Design (2021). These worlds are not new. We know a lot about them and can start to speculate about their future. 

1. Facebook’s landgrab

One worry that most people should have is that this is Facebook. Rebranding the whole company as Metaverse, or Meta, is a huge leap but the Metaverse brand is just flying a marketing kite. It is not really a rebrand - we, and they, still call it Facebook. What we need to question is their move towards total ownership of such virtual worlds. By owning the world, you own everything; the who, what, where, when and how. As a landgrab on the internet, it needs to be treated with due suspicion.

2. Data on everything

Then there’s the data collected within the Metaverse. Facebook want to do a Microsoft and own the OS for virtual worlds by market dominance. At the moment data is distributed, do we really want a centralised place where data can be harvested, not only social data, what is said, but also physical, behavioural data? The opportunities fro extreme forms of surveillance are obvious, so I think not.

3. Metaverse as an economy

Most metaverses, even Second Life, but mostly large-scale games, create worlds in which people want to buy and sell virtual stuff. That's fine on a small scale. When you have a world that is the size of a small, even large, country, you have an economy. But economies are regulated. Do we want facebook to be a regulated economy, like a country? There are already serious concerns about Facebook’s role as a supranational force. One can see the time when such virtual worlds have the status of a country but not for now, and not ones where Billionaires are kings, no matter how benign the PR says they are.

4. Metaverse crypto

Notice how Facebook dabbled in cryptocurrency recently? In 2019 it created Libra, rebranded in 2020 as Diem. This created such a backlash that it has all but disappeared. That doesn’t mean it has disappeared. Facebook as a central bank controlling a cryptocurrency is a frightening thought. Remember, Facebook is not creating a Metaverse as a charitable act, they want to make money... lots of it. Allowing them to create a global virtual world with a virtual cryptocurrency and economy is being touted. This is truly frightening.

5. 2D to 3D problem

3D movies and 3D TV bombed. Sure we like 3D but desirable experiences are not all about 3D fidelity. Even stereo is no longer a big deal in listening to music. Media rich is not mind rich. We love a good podcast precisely because it is a stripped down, single media experience. It feels intimate, like being in that conversation. Turns out that for entertainment and much else, we like just enough to do the job well for immersion (big 2D TV) and no more. The Metaverse may be piling on the pixels but it is not clear that this is what consumers want.

6. Communications

The Metaverse has problems when it comes to communications. It is not so much the high fidelity expectations of the avatars but the communications within a group. It is difficult to get turn taking and the real dynamics of a real meeting going in such environments, especially when they are in a 2D representation. We have two ears, two eyes and a brain that has evolved to monitor around us. Our ears are the shape they are, with folds, as a form of sterescopic radar for listening to others around us. Our eyes are stereoscopic and on the top of our swivelling necks and bodies. Take any of that away and you have a problem. Interestingly Zoom solves that by taking a 3D world and tiling it in 2D. The Metaverse may therefore have a worse group dynamic than Zoom, a lot worse.

7. Turn taking

In a fascinating piece of research by Carnegie Mellon, it turns out that turn taking and problem solving went better when learners turned OFF their video cameras. It would appear that not seeing others in a group is sometimes a lot better than full visibility, as one can focus on the task, not the people.

8. Appearances matter

The Carnegie Mellon study surprised a lot of people who had turned to teaching online during Covid, where the general advice was to keep students’ webcams ON. Counterintuitive though this may be, it seems that students are concerned about how they and their home environments look online. This says something about being careful about true needs in full-blown online environments. That's why most existing Metaverses are chocked full of bizarre avatars.

9. Avatar narcissism

In most virtual worlds, weird avatars are the norm, as people don’t really want to show their true age, weight and looks online. It is all colour, costumes, animals features, weirdness and cartoon fun. How people represent themselves online is far from what they look like in the real world. Will we have a parallel world where people are perennially young, good looking and thin or look like oddballs to mask their ordinariness? It promotes exaggeration of social norms around what one should look like on one hand and freakshows on the other. 

10. Meetings

In a sense, Zoom meetings have accelerated the experience and demand for virtual worlds. Yet there are real doubts about the Metaverse as meetings' technology. Meetings need to be real. We have meetings because we want to have real discussion and make decisions. Is this helped by another layer of representation - avatars? Maybe not. We want to hear real voices and see real faces. The key is not actually the tech but how the meetings are set up and run. They need a good Chair, clear agenda and proper turn taking, along with a movement towards decisions and actions. Having a cartoon, avatar layer may not help one bit. In fact, it may distance you from, or smother, the event.

11. Overstimulation

A surprising finding in VR research was its of lack of efficacy in learning. This is partly to do with the poor design of learning experiences and the focus on creating worlds, not actual learning experiences. But there are lessons to be learnt. Overstimutaion is clearly a problem. People are overwhelmed, and get a sort of stage fright or wonderment in fully immersive online environments. They also get obsessed with detail. This can hinder, rather than help with other tasks, such as efficient meetings and learning. There seems to be a form of uncanny valley effect going on here, where the technology captivates but doesn't relax you.

12. Playworlds

What happens when you build such worlds. Turns out most people muck about a lot. They have fun. It is not as conducive to serious endeavours as you would think, such as collaborative brainstorming and design, even meetings. In fact, it is often a bit anarchic. In VR open worlds, you get people donning full body suits and doing gymnastic moves (and more). It’s showtime! That's why most Metaverses are actually in the games world, something that seems to have passed everyone (apart from gamers) by.

13. Policing

I had a female avatar in Second Life and used to recommend this as the best form of sexual harrassent training you’ll ever receive as a man. It was relentless. There is a real problem in policing this sort of behaviour in open worlds. It is not like the real world where norms are accepted, rules and laws implemented and agreed. It is all a bit Wild West.

14. Fakery

Fakery is the norm in terms of appearance but there is also the problem of fraud and fakery on scale when such a world becomes a phishing ground for scammers and scams. It is bad enough with email and the simple telephone without full-on people talking, charming and defrauding you into doing things that are harmful. The potential for bad actors doing bad stuff is immense.

15. VR shutout

Note how we go full screen when screensharing, that makes sense in terms of focus. There is nothing worse than using 3D VR then seeing 2D video and PowerPoint inside that environment. The problem with VR is that it stops you from using keyboards, taking notes by pen and generally seeing and dealing with the real world. VR is a new medium and not a gadget, yet has not taken off as a mass medium. Even when untethered, it is still largely a niche gamed device. That tells us something.

16. Tech not invisible

Good technology is increasingly invisible. The Metaverse, especially if it involves headsets, makes the technology incredibly tangible, visceral and obvious. It may be that the invisible tech, powered by AI and data, such as IoT, voice assistants and AI as the new UI, will win out and not Metaverses. People want solutions not clumsy tech and the Metaverse is all too visible and clumsy.

17. 90:9:1  consume:comment:create

Most people online are lurkers who consume (90%), a small percentage comment (9%) and 1% create. You can play around with these figures but you get the point. The Metaverse may be just another playground for the 1% of extroverts and narcissists. Most people are reluctant to expose themselves and engage with strangers in such environments, so we may be looking at yet another niche world.

18. Build

Another problem associated with the 90:9:1 problem is who will build these worlds? Fine in Minecraft but the idea that adults will be able to handle the tools and have the time and inclination to do this is ambitious, if not utopian. It is not just the tools, it is the skills. Giving someone a copy of Word does not make them a novelist and giving someone a 3D builder does not make them an architect. Sure there may be pre-built environments. But this is a gargantuan task. 

19. Social engagement

Do people really want to engage with strangers like this, as avatars in a virtual world? It is not clear that they do. The reluctance to engage in this form of communication is interesting. Low-fidelity, social media may actually be better as there is less reveal of the self and more control of exposure. We still use texting, messaging and voice calls - a lot. Virtual worlds give immediate and total exposure that can be unsettling. People may not be as openly social as the extroverts think.

20. Breakout problem

We have a differentiation of media. While the Metaverse is being touted, we have the rise of the audio-only podcast, the inverse of the Metaverse. Philip Rosedale the chief architect of Second Life gave up on High Fidelity, a VR version of Second Life, to focus on spatial audio technology. Second Life is still a million people and a $650 million transactional environment but, as Rosedale says “it didn't break out, it didn't become a billion people. And the hope that Facebook has is that there'll be a billion people using a metaverse”. Maybe, maybe not.

Conclusion

Technology surprises and I have no doubt that Metaverse-type tech will do just that. It may be in speaking to our future or past selves, learning languages, political engagement, dating, porn - no one really knows. But of one thing I’m sure, it will happen, just happen differently from how we envisage.

Completion a category mistake in MOOCs

In a fascinating survey taken at the start of the University of Derby’s ‘Dementia’ MOOC, using Canvas, where 775 learners were asked whether they expected to fully engage with the course, 477 said yes but 258 stated that they did NOT INTEND TO COMPLETE. This showed that people come to MOOCs with different intentions. In fact, around 35% of both groups completed, a much higher level of completion that the vast majority of MOOCs. They bucked the trend.

Now much is made of dropout rates in MOOCs, yet the debate is usually flawed. It is a category mistake to describe people who stop at some point in a MOOC as ‘dropouts’. This is the language of institutions. People drop out of institutions,  ‘University dropouts', not open, free and online experiences. I’m just amazed that many millions have dropped in.

So let’s go back to that ‘Dementia’ MOOC, where 26.29% of those that enroled never actually did anything in the course. These are the window-shoppers and false starters. False starters are common in the consumer learning market. For example, the majority of those who buy language courses, never complete much more than a small portion of the course. And in MOOCs, many simply have a look, often just curious, others want a brief taster, just an introduction to the subject, or just some familiarity with the topic, and further in, many find the level inappropriate or, because they are NOT 18 year old undergraduates, find that life (job, kids etc.) make them too busy to continue. For these reasons, many, myself included, have long argued that course completion is NOT the way to judge a MOOC (Clark D. 2013, Ho A. et al, 2014; Hayes, 2015).

Course completion may make sense when you have paid up front for your University course and made a huge investment in terms of money, effort, moving to a new location and so on. Caplan rightly says that 'signalling' that you attended a branded institution explains the difference. In open, free and online courses there is no such commitment, risks and investments. The team at Derby argue for a different approach to the measurement of the impact of MOOCs, based not on completion but meaningful learning. This recognises that the diverse audience want and get different things from a MOOC and that this has to be recognised. MOOCs are not single long-haul flights, they are more like train journeys where some people want to get to the end of the line but most people get on and off along the way.

Increasing persistence

Many of the arguments around course completion in MOOCs are, I have argued, category mistakes, based on a false comparison with traditional HE, semester-long courses. We should not, of course, allow these arguments to distract us from making MOOCs better, in the sense of having more sticking power for participants. This is where things get interesting, as there have been some features of recent MOOCs that have caught my eye as providing higher levels of persistence among learners. The University of Derby ‘Dementia’ MOOC, full title ‘Bridging the Dementia Divide: Supporting People Living with Dementia’ is a case in point.

1. Audience sensitive

MOOC learners are not undergraduates who expect a diet of lectures delivered synchronously over a semester. They are not at college and do not want to conform to institutional structures and timetables. It is unfortunate that many MOOC designers treat MOOC learners as if they were physically (and psychologically) at a University – they are not. They have jobs, kids, lives, things to do. MOOC designers have to get out of their institutional thinking and realize that their audience often has a different set of intentions and needs. The new MOOCs need to be sensitive to learner needs.

2. Make all material available

To be sensitive to a variety of learners (see why course completion is a wrong-headed measure), the solution is to provide flexible approaches to learning within a MOOC, so that different learners can take different routes and approaches. Some may want to be part of a ‘cohort’ of learners and move through the course with a diet of synchronous events but many MOOC learners are far more likely to be driven by interest than paper qualifications, so make the learning accessible from the start. Having materials available from day one allows learners to start later than others, proceed at their own rate and, importantly, catch up when they choose. This is in line with real learners in the real world and not institutional learning.

2. Modular

The idea of a strictly linear diet of lectures and learning should also be eschewed, as different learners want different portions of the learning, at different times. A more modular approach, where modules are self-contained and can be taken in any order is one tactic. Adaptive MOOCs, using AI software that guides learners through content on the basis of their needs, is another. 6.16% of the dementia MOOCs didn’t start with Module 1.

This tracked data shows that some completed the whole course in one day, others did a couple of modules on one day, many did the modules in a different order, some went through in a linear and measured fashion. Some even went backwards. The lesson here is that the course needs to be designed to cope with these different approaches to learning, in terms of order and time. This is better represented in this state diagram, showing the different strokes for different folks. 

Each circle is a module containing the number of completions. Design for flexibility.

3. Shorter

MOOC learners don’t need the 10-week semester structure. Some want much shorter and faster experiences, others medium length and some longer. Higher Education is based on an agricultural calendar, with set semesters that fit harvest and holiday patterns. The rest of the world does not work to this pre-industrial timetable. In the Derby Dementia MOOC, there is considerable variability on when people did their learning. Many took less that the six weeks but that did not mean they spent less time on the course, Many preferred concentrated bouts of longer learning than the regular once per week model that many MOOCs recommend or mandate. Others did the week-by-week learning. We have to understand that learning for MOOC audiences is taken erratically and not always in line with the campus model. We need to design for this.

4. Structured and unstructured

I personally find the drip-feed, synchronous, moving through the course with a cohort, rather annoying and condescending. The evidence in the Dementia MOOC suggests that there was more learner activity in unsupported periods than supported periods. This shows a considerable thirst for doing things at your own pace and convenience, than that mandated by synchronous, supported courses. Nevertheless, this is not an argument for a wholly unstructured strategy. This MOOC attracted a diverse set of learners and having both structured and unstructured approach brought the entire range of learners along.

You can see that the learners who experienced the structured approach of live Monday announcement by the lead academic, a Friday wrap-up with a live webinar, help forum and email query service was a sizeable group in any one week. Yet the others, who learnt without support were also substantial in every week. This dual approach seems ideal, appealing to an entire range of learners with different needs and motivations.

5. Social not necessary

Many have little interest in social chat and being part of a consistent group or cohort. One of the great MOOC myths is that social participation is a necessary condition for learning and/or success. Far too much is made of ‘chat’ in MOOCs, in terms of needs and quality. I’m not arguing for no social components in MOOCs, only claiming that the evidence shows that they are less important than the ‘social constructivist’ orthodoxy in design would suggest. In essence, I’m saying it is desirable but not essential. To rely on this as the essential pedagogic technique, is, in my opinion, a mistake and is to impose an ideology on learners that they do not want.

6.  Adult content

In line with the idea of being sensitive to the needs of the learners, I’ve found too many rather earnest, talking heads from academics, especially the cosy chats, more suitable to the 18 year-old undergraduate, than the adult learner. You need to think about voice and tone, and avoid second rate PhD research and an over-Departmental approach to the content. I’m less interested in what your Department is doing and far more interested in the important developments and findings, at an international level in your field. MOOC learners have not chosen to come to your University, they’ve chosen to study a topic. We have to let up on being too specific in content, tone and approach.

7. Content as a driver
In another interesting study of MOOCs, the researchers found that stickiness was highly correlated to the quality of the 'content'. This contradicts those who believe that the primary driver in MOOCs is social. They found that the learners dropped out if they didn't find the content appropriate, or of the right quality and good content turns out to be a primary driver for perseverance and completion, as their stats show.

8. Badges

The Dementia MOOC had six independent, self-contained sections, each with its own badge for completion, and each can be taken in any order, with an overall badge for completion. These partial rewards for partial completion proved valuable. It moves us away from the idea that certificates of completion are the way we should judge MOOC participation. In the Dementia MOOC 1201 were rewarded with badges against 527 completion certificates.

9. Demand driven
MOOCs are made for all sorts of reasons, marketing, grant applications, even whim - this is supply led. Yet the MOOCs market has changed dramatically, away from representing the typical course offerings in Universities, towards more vocational subjects. This is a good thing, as the providers are quite simply reacting to demand. Before making your MOOC, do some marketing, estimate the size of your addressible audince and tweak your marketing towards that audience. Tis is likely to resultin a higher number of participants, as well as higher stickiness.

10. Marketing
If there's one thing that will get you more participants and more stickiness, it's good marketing. Yet academic institutions are often short of htese skills or see it as 'trade'. This is a big mistake. Marketing matters, it is a skill and need a budget.

Conclusion

The researchers at Derby used a very interesting phrase in their conclusion, that “a certain amount of chaos may have to be embraced”. This is right. Too many MOOCs are over-structured, too linear and too like traditional University courses. They need to loosen up and deliver what these newer diverse audiences want. Of course, this also means being careful about what is being achieved here. Quality within these looser structures and in each of these individual modules must be maintained.

Bibiography

Clark, D. (2013). MOOCs: Adoption curve explains a lot. http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/moocs-adoption-curve-explains-lot.html

Hayes, S. (2015). MOOCs and Quality: A review of the recent literature. Retrieved 5 October 2015, from http://www.qaa.ac.uk/en/Publications/Documents/MOOCs-and- Quality-Literature-Review-15.pdf

Ho, A. D., Reich, J., Nesterko, S., Seaton, D. T., Mullaney, T., Waldo, J. & Chuang, I. (2014). HarvardX and MITx: The first year of open online courses. Re- trieved 22 September 2015, from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2381263

Leach, M. Hadi, S. Bostock, (2016) A. Supporting Diverse Learner Goals through Modular Design and Micro-Learning. Presentation at European MOOCs Stakeholder Summ
Hadi, S. Gagen P. New model formeasuring MOOCs completion rates. Presentation at European MOOCs Stakeholder Summit.
You can enrol for the University of Derby 'Dementia' MOOC here.
And more MOOC stuff here.

Must watch freakout: 10 reasons why Facebook is good for Oculus Rift

That was my sister!
Now we’ve seen Tron, The Matrix and Minority Report. But nothing, absolutely nothing in the cinema matches the actual experience of virtual reality. When I first slipped the Oculus Rift over my head, even though it was a development kit it was such a blast, such a mind-altering experience. It blew my mind. I knew then, that it could shift consciousness sand that its potential in education, which is all about cognitive change, was immense.

Rarely do you come across a piece of tech that you try once and you know that it will create radical change. That’s what makes this different. VR is not a gadget it is a medium. It’s moving from 2D to 3D, literally and extra dimension to your mind. I showed it to everyone I could muster, at conferences, to companies, at home, at parties, at a nightclub. I even took it to Africa. Eventually I found funding for two educational simulations in social care and retail. But there’s a story to tell here.

Mr Luckey

VR goes back to the 50s and 60s and had a rollercoaster ride for several decades in adventurous, but expensive, applications in the military, health, gaming and the arts. So Palmer Luckey, Mr Oculus Rift, joined in at the end of a long journey by researchers and pioneers in VR. He’s honest about this. What he did was immerse himself in that stuff. He worked with explorers, like Skip Rizzo and Mark Bolas, just two of many people who experimented and pushed the technology forward bit by bit. But it was Palmer who had the focus, drive and foresight to make it happen technically and commercially.

Good timing

Technology leaps are rarely single pieces of technology. They use a number of past technologies to create a breakthrough. This happened with printing, where the screw press, new inks, casting techniques and moveable type, along with papare, became the print revolution. More recently, the smartphone is an assembly of technologies, screens, sensors, processors and batteries, that made them fly off the shelves. When the technologies all work and the prices are right, you have a volume product. They are ensembles of tech and it was Luckey who brought together a suit of smart sensors, cheap screens, optics, processing power and software to get the potential price down to a few hundred of dollars. To get to presence, the feeling that you really are in another place, you have to tick off a long list of technical and psychological problems. Then there’s the graphics cards, 3D graphics packages and skills in building 3D worlds that have emerged to feed the games, movies, TV and other worlds. This needs lots of smart people. Oculus assembled those people and had the money and focus to get it done. This was never possible in a research lab, this attitude – focus and speed.

What’s also new is that Palmer Luckey had Kickstarter at his fingertips. That meant quick money. Traditional investment cash suffers from lag. They often lack vision and the adventurous enthusiasm for tech that you need for a tech-driven project like this. After a $2.4 m cash pull from Kickstarter, came the smart move of distributing affordable and not half bad, developer kits. This created a shitstorm of YouTube, blogger, tech tester and social media splurge. Demand came from this network, not a corporate marketing team or professional launch. Almost every gamer or tech-savvy kid knows about Oculus, although most have never tried one. Demand is already massive.

Zuckerberg arrives

Then, out of the blue, I read that Facebook had bought Oculus Rift for a cool $2 billion. Remember, this device hadn’t been launched and has no user base. It’s a prototype. So why buy a piece of kit that has been around since the 1950s with not a single customer? Well, they saw what I saw and when a prototype changes your consciousness and literally allows you to see the future, it’s time to slap the cash on the table. Zuckerberg’s opening statement impressed me, “Imagine enjoying courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world, or consulting with a doctor face-to-face – just by putting goggles on in your home.” He gets it. This is not just a games’ peripheral, it’s a game changer; in education, health and entertainment.

Why Facebook is a good partner

1. Missing link

There’s a missing link in this story - Cory Ondrejka -  the guy behind Second Life. Guess what, he’s now Head of Engineering at Facebook. It was Cory who got Zuckerberg hooked. Remember, at Facebook it’s still a tech-obsessed guy who runs the company, not some MBA clone. They tried, it, loved it and they bought it. This was a tech to tech sale – no suits involved. It was that simple.

2. Shock & awesome

It’s not like buying a population of users. This is pure tech. Nobody has used it except a bunch of developers on the DK1. It’s driven by the pure ‘awe’ factor. Try this thing. For once the word ‘Awesome!’ is not hyperbolic. I’ve demoed this kit to hundreds of people in many countries, including Africa, and the reaction has been, well, awesome. This was a sale based on actual experience of the product.

3. Game changer not games peripheral

It won’t be funnelled into the pure ‘gaming’ world. Facebook are not a gaming company and have a wider field of view. They see education, health and social media as major markets. Sony, it’s main, and only real competitor (at present) is really aiming at the games’ market. They have the PS4 and future consoles in mind. In fact, Morpheus only works with a PS4. That’s their game. I’m not criticising that, just saying that Facebook are playing an entirely different game.

4. Brave new worlds

VR is about creating and entering new worlds, some will be closed but the real prize are more open worlds where you can meet others, new forms of world building. It’s this sort of vision we need, not the Microsoft vision for Kinect (basically low-level gaming) or Apple gadgetry. The only other company that could have been a contender here was Google. Bu they’re a platform company. In my view they missed the boat.

5. Head start

Facebook had the vision to create the largest alternative world we’ve ever seen, inhabited by over 1.5 billion people. That’s one hell of an existing market. If anyone can make this fly on this scale, it’s Zuckerberg. He has a head start – 1.5 billion eyeballs. Of course, it’s also a hedge against seepage, competitors, even disillusionment with Facebook itself. At some point it will be challenged and they need to move it to higher ground to defend itself.

6. $2 billion

$2 billion is a lot of cash. It will accelerate research, recruitment and production. This means getting to market quicker with a product that is cheap, as it has a greater chance of getting massive volume sales. When you can sell tens, even hundreds of millions of these things, then £2 billion looks reasonable.

7. Consumer company

This is a consumer company, driven by the user experience and the experience is mind blowing. It moves us on into visual and aural worlds not the world of text and 2D snaps. Facebook is driven by users and their created content. This is what the Oculus promises, worlds created by and shared by millions of people. It’s about the opportunity to create things that you will be gagging to experience. For some, who have never seen VR before, it’s almost a life changing experience, the idea that you can enter another world and feel as though you really are there and that it really can induce intense emotions and sensations. Presence is about being there, not just seeing something. There’s a world of difference between seeing and being. As a transformative experience, it is compelling.

8. Not traditional media

This is way beyond those media folks trapped in 2D. You can buy as many big screen TVs as you want, even a hokey 3D one. You can go to the cinema to get a pseudo-immersive experience on an even bigger screen. This is just upgrading through bigger and bigger screens. The Oculus leap is to wrap a screen around the back of your head, above and below, put you right inside any created world. That’s a breakthrough. Gamers get it, those that have tried the Oculus get it – traditional media companies don’t. It’s just another slot in their TV shows about gadgets. That’s why a traditional media company couldn’t handle an Oculus acquisition.

9. We live in a 3D world, not 2D

Education is a 2D affair. Teaching is 2D subjects taught using 2D materials, hence the focus on the academic, at the expense of the vocational. And we wonder why graduates and school leavers are ill-prepared for the real word – they haven’t been taught about the real world, only a 2D representation of that world. Education, at last, has an affordable medium in which any world can be represented and where we can, as the psychology of learning tells us we should, learn by doing. This leap from 2D to 3D is to literally add a new dimension to our experience.

10. More than mimicry

This is not mimicry. It’s not about copying the real world, although that is useful in itself. What really matters is the ability to go beyond the real. It started in flights sims, where you can repeatedly experience things you are unlikely to experience in real life, but need to know, for example repeatedly crashing the plane. It’s about doing the dangerous, even impossible. Going down to the molecular level, into space, into psychological realms, even different, induced brain states. It’s aesthetic and artistic experiences you’ve never had. It’s high-end training in surgery simulations. It’s prototyping almost anything you buy. It’s travel to places you’ve never seen and may never see for real. See yourself and experience what it’s like to be another gender, race or age. It’s just so damn different.

Downsides

Before I get flooded with complaints about Facebook and privacy, let me anticipate an answer. I’m not one of those people who see Facebook as a totalitarian monster. I’ve spent years in their world, for free, and am OK with them knowing something about me. They’ve given me renewed friendships with people I knew decades ago, new friends around the world, tons of great content, work, rip-roaring debate, entertainment and a whole load of stuff that has widened my knowledge of the world and others. That, for me, is a fair trade. I ‘like’ Facebook and resent then sneering types, who have never used it but think they know what it is, or use it, then use it to constantly complain about it. If you don’t like the play – leave the theatre.

Leaving Facebook as evil totalitarian corporate aside, there are several predictable risks that may befall this deal. First, in catching this butterfly they may crush it. I don’t think this is likely as Cory Ondrejka is leading the show and it is not in Facebook’s interest to blow $2 billion on something they let be destroyed. Second, they may play the wrong game and force everyone through some dystopian route. This I doubt as we’re not in some David Eggers novel here. This is real cash and a real business. They want the Oculus to enhance their business not make people hate them or leave Facebook. 

Conclusion

Whatever the outcome, I hope it succeeds. It was a bold move and I like boldness. I also like the story, a long, hard trail of research and pioneering work, comes together through a visionary and crowdsourced investment, taken to the whole world through a social media company. I want us to escape from Disney, Time Warner, Murdoch and all the other media companies that try social media and tech, and usually fail. It’s time to move on and give the new kids on the media block a chance.