When further researching MOOCs this week, I was surprised to come across an article from the BBC website (dated September 2013) about SPOCs (small, private online courses). SPOCs are still free but access is restricted to a much smaller number of selected candidates. The smaller class size allows “much more rigorous assessment and greater validation of identity” and I can see how this more ‘customized’ type of course would probably lead to the issue of credits and the introduction of fees. While Harvard’s metaphor of Russian dolls does make sense in theory, I wonder whether SPOCs are nothing more than online courses and potentially undermine the value and point of MOOCs.
Walther (1997) suggests that we can understand much of online community behaviour by referencing the ‘anticipated future interaction’ of participants. It’s interesting that if participants can foresee future interaction, they will act in a friendlier way, be more cooperative, self-disclose, and generally engage in socially positive communications. This couldn’t be more true from what I’ve seen on the Gamification MOOC this week. As well as the community building aspect, I was also fascinated by how a group of participants resolved an issue with peer marking assignments which were not written in English and how one person asked for feedback from peers on his own assignment which had missed the submission date (and received it!).
Balfour’s ‘Assessing Writing in MOOCs: Automated and Calibrated Peer Review’ is very interesting and I was surprised to learn that AES reached commercial viability in the 1990s by being indistinguishable from human evaluators for short essays with a specific focus (Attali, 2007). In a review of AES applications Shermis et al. (2010) found that machine evaluation of essays actually correlated more highly with human raters than the human raters correlated with other human raters. So machine evaluation is only distinguishable from human evaluation because it is more consistent!
The following chart is a useful comparison of AES and CPR:
And on a final note – am intrigued by the whole discussion on technological determinism and thought that Kozinets’ summed it up quite nicely: ‘technology does not determine culture, but they are co-determining, co-constructive forces – with our ideas and actions, we choose technologies and adapt and shape them. Culture does not entirely control the technologies we use either. The way technology and culture interact is a complex dance, an interweaving and intertwining’.
Balfour, S., Assessing Writing in MOOCs: Automated and Calibrated Peer Review, Research & Practice in Assessment 06/2013; 8(1):40-48
Coughlan, S., Harvard plans to boldly go with ‘Spocs’ 23/09/2013 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-24166247
Kozinets, R. (2010) Chapter 2 ‘Understanding Culture Online’, Netnography: doing ethnographic research online. London: Sage. Pp. 21-40
