Stepping back and stepping in: Facilitating learner-centered experiences in MOOCs

Sarah Blum-Smith; Maxwell M Yurkofsky; Karen Brennan

doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104042

Stepping back and stepping in: Facilitating learner-centered experiences in MOOCs

Comput Educ. 2021 Jan:160:104042. doi: 10.1016/j.compedu.2020.104042. Epub 2020 Oct 14.

Authors

Sarah Blum-Smith¹, Maxwell M Yurkofsky¹, Karen Brennan¹

Affiliation

¹ Harvard Graduate School of Education, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.

Abstract

While the hype around Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) has subsided in the past few years, such environments provide a rich opportunity to explore ongoing questions at the intersection of teaching, learning, and technology. This paper explores how a set of facilitation teams described enacting their learner-centered pedagogical aspirations through MOOC platforms. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we present a set of six facilitator actions: "giving up control," "distributing facilitation," "being live," "amplifying," "modeling," and "being explicit." We discuss these actions as emerging from the negotiation between existing pedagogical aspirations and the realities of a new medium, highlighting how they involve facilitators both stepping back (making space for and foregrounding learner expertise and perspectives) and stepping in (intervening and directing as a facilitator). This research contributes to the ongoing work of articulating the substance and specificity of teaching in learner-centered pedagogy and the persistent challenges of enacting that pedagogy in massive, online spaces.

Keywords: Adult learning; Cooperative/collaborative learning; Distance education and online learning; Pedagogical issues; Teaching/learning strategies.