Cohort based education

Interesting article on Cohort based education written by Wes Kao, was shared with me by @AbhishekSinha.

Wes makes the point that content is no longer king, cohorts are. Now that content is either freely available or made affordable to purchase online, instructors are finding out that content is not the game to play. But for students, its value that counts and not just accessibility and affordability. And that is where, she says, cohort based courses come in.

Cohort based courses are what we have been doing offline for quite a while, many hundreds of years. It is also what we have been doing online for at least a couple of decades. It s a group of people coming online together, with shared goals, and a fixed timeframe to accomplish them in, directed by a live teacher or coach. According to Wes, it stands opposed to asynchronous, self paced, passive content consumption so typical of the current MOOCs (or xMOOCs as they have been better classified). This also results in low completion rates. Wes's discussion on cohort-based courses reminds me of the discussions on SPOCs (small, private online courses) that were avidly discussed when the xMOOCs debacle became painfully obvious.

CBCs may be nothing new. Clearly active learning as a methodology isn't new either. Online bi-directional learning or interleaving is not something new for students and teachers. And clearly, making instructors more accountable and engaged, is a prerequisite to effective learning experiences, whichever medium you choose. Also there is a rich history of courses being run at scale (e.g. CCK08) which exemplified what MOOCs could be. But is it a format that needs to be amplified?

Wes is looking at an online model that can succeed at scale (at which the low/no cost MOOCs are operating at) and also command a premium. Is that possible? As we hit scale, we need mechanisms for learning that also scale. That is, without the concomitant increase in manual effort, can we reap the same dividend?

The answers lie in re-envisioning learning in the online space, instead of continuing to think of it as a conversion from the physical to the online format. Which means we have to think of fundamentally different ways of teaching and learning online, than what we have been known to do.

A case in point. Take the 'M' in MOOCs. It stands for Massive. Most people construe the massiveness to be represented by the sheer number of people who join the MOOC. The larger the size of the cohort the more massive it becomes. However, is there another definition of 'massive' - one that represents a very different (apples to oranges) way of looking at scale? What if we looked at 'massive' to represent the extent and depth of interaction between participants?

As an example look at the following SNA by Aras Bozkurt of a course Dave Cormier ran on Rhizomatic Learning on Facebook reveals that by Week 6 of the course, connected clusters emerged that indicated the pattern and structure of collaboration. One could visualize and see how our participation in the course gave rise to this kind of a collaboration graph from a set of individual disconnected points when we started.

Graphs like these tell us how participants are self-organizing, making sense collaboratively. While some graduate to being 'hubs', it is also easy to spot 'lurkers' and non-participants as well. Do our online teachers view collaboration graphs online while making decisions as to how to steer the level of collaboration in their groups?

Would this graph be possible to model or determine offline, in a physical class? Possible, but difficult right now - if students have devices, then it would perhaps be simpler; else we start going into the realm of face recognition, NLP and audio-video fingerprinting. So let us posit, for the time being, that this is unique to online modes.

Similarly, if we look at the word 'open', the first 'O' in the term MOOC, we normally mean it in terms of who can enrol - anyone can enrol (or later, not as 'free' as in 'free beer'). But the open-ness we can talk of in a distinctly online manner is when we think of diversity of opinion (not just participants) and a culture of sharing. What are patterns of sharing, building trust, engagement, collaboration, critique and listening that we need to encourage in ways that are open and democratic? This again is a uniquely measurable online attribute, not easy to replicate in physical settings.

Thirdly, if we look at the second 'O' in the term MOOC, which stands for 'Online', we come across yet another paradigm. It is not just that online refers to a medium of transacting the MOOC or CBC, more importantly, it is the definition of online that merits attention. For example, the nature of learning and teaching on centralized platforms are different from that on decentralized platforms. Centralized platforms obey a design that is conceived centrally. What if we allowed every participant their own choice of platform - social media, LMS, blogs, virtual art, virtual 3D platforms, networks, podcasts - to amplify their voice, and to connect with others - with 'centralized' platforms becoming the invisible hand, connecting the infinite strands of conversations, continuously deepening and widening the networks of the 'course'.

And finally, we come to the 'C' in MOOCs, the term 'course'. It literally means 'a way' or 'a path' that participants could follow to achieve their learning goals. We have added some other attributes - notably, time - a fixed static frame of reference - making a course a stock item, synchronising activities in a manner that cohorts will follow. However, while this is convenient, it may not be very effective, especially where learning is indeed nonlinear in nature. We all recognize that teaching largely happens to the middle, and that too is a stereotyped but practical way of looking at it from the point of view of a teacher or even a curriculum designer. When does a course become personalized for the participant, when is it tuned to each participant's pace or needs, when does it become an episode in the longer journey of actually learning something, rather than a single snapshot at a point in time? It is clear that time has to be rethought online, and the effective use of it has to be focused on.

Hopefully, now that the infatuation with xMOOCs has run its course, we will witness new innovations in how we conceptualize online learning!