Netnography – Total Leadership Learning community

What are the netnographic outcomes of this short investigation? (Note, this should be taken to support the Slides found here.)

In regards to the community it’s a mixed bag. Reportedly there are 33,000+ participating in the course, yet I am only involved with smaller groups. Whenever I search the hashtag on Twitter, rarely do I find links to other meaningful content. I am usually confronted with someone inadvertently advertising the course or saying how much difference this is having on them.

I decided to focus on the experiential and look at smaller communities. At the start of the Total Leadership course I signed up to a Spanish speaking group and we initially began to write to communicate via a Skype chat. Later on we decided to meet up online once a week, in a F2F chat. The group was very much full of business professionals, interested in the content, but also focused on making links with other business people. One thing that defined the group as a community of practice was their definition of certain terms and what they understood by them. As they went along defining their ideas, the began to expand and explore on certain themes they developed their own meaning among the group.  Based on clarifying things that they didn’t understand due to the mode of delivery in L2 they pushed the course into the realm of cMOOC. Some interesting aspects arose from their misunderstandings and the discussion of ideas.

I found the course to be a mix between cMOOC and xMOOC as it pushes the student to interact with peers and self reflect, instead of simply consuming knowledge, whilst my experience in the Spanish speaking group further affirmed these beliefs.  It was an aspect of the course which I am greatly enjoying.

Facebook: to be honest I haven’t had the chance to really dig deep into the Facebook group. I found the Skype and group forum interaction interesting and rewarding. The people I have met on the course so far have been positive and friendly, heaping praise on the content and impact it is having on their lives. There is still a buzz around the course.

5 thoughts on “Netnography – Total Leadership Learning community

  1. Jeremy Knox

    Good to see your ethnographic work coming together here Martyn. This MOOC sounds interesting, and you’ve highlighted some intriguing ideas here.

    ‘Reportedly there are 33,000+ participating in the course, yet I am only involved with smaller groups’

    So was that just about your choosing to focus on smaller groups, or did you find that the MOOC was actually not functioning much as a community of 33,000? Was it a MOOC already comprised of smaller communities? That seems to me quite interesting, because much of the hype around MOOCs has been the ‘massive’ enrolment numbers. So, is one of your outcomes here perhaps that ‘massive’ numbers aren’t really conducive to ‘community’?

    ‘I signed up to a Spanish speaking group’

    The language issue here sounds interesting too. Was the course exclusively delivered in English? If so, did you find that the Spanish group felt isolated in some way, or perhaps just more comfortable to speak Spanish in their communications?

    ‘they pushed the course into the realm of cMOOC’

    I wonder of you could say a bit more about what elements of the ‘cMOOC’ were being displayed here. the Stewart (2013) reading would be useful for that.

    ‘I found the course to be a mix between cMOOC and xMOOC as it pushes the student to interact with peers and self reflect, instead of simply consuming knowledge, whilst my experience in the Spanish speaking group further affirmed these beliefs.’

    So, was it an intentional part of the course design that ‘pushed’ students to undertake more of these ‘cMOOC’ activities? Or was it somehow related to their preferred language – which would be very interesting indeed?

    Something else to comment on here (or in other post) would be some thought on your role as ethnographer. Did you find any difficulties with your ‘insider’ role? Did you disclose to the group that you were a ‘researcher’?

    Reply
    1. Martyn Post author

      “So was that just about your choosing to focus on smaller groups, or did you find that the MOOC was actually not functioning much as a community of 33,000?”

      I did choose to focus on smaller groups, whenever I went to Twitter to seek out posts related to the Total Leadership course I only found tweets promoting the course, I never really found any links to additional content. I think a community of 33,000 discussing themes related to the course would be a mess.

      “Was it a MOOC already comprised of smaller communities?”

      At the initial stages of the MOOC, through the forum, learners split off into regional study groups.

      “So, is one of your outcomes here perhaps that ‘massive’ numbers aren’t really conducive to ‘community’?”

      Most definitely, communities of practice and personal learner networks seem to be present in the smaller groups, I’m not too sure how a ‘massive’ group would look, just based on the sheer number of comments and dialogue one would have to sift through in order to follow a conversation or be involved in a meaningful way.

      “Was the course exclusively delivered in English?”

      Yes, totally delivered in English.

      If so, did you find that the Spanish group felt isolated in some way, or perhaps just more comfortable to speak Spanish in their communications?

      I don’t think they were isolated, many of them were executives with a great level of English. More than this they enjoyed collaborating and discussing the themes, clarifying points, and further exploring the topics. If I were to repeat the activity I would have perhaps chosen a small English speaking group and compared and contrasted the discussions/direction each group took. As I don’t have any insight to other groups I wouldn’t like to assume anything, however I think this could be down to the Spanish speaking community searching for clarification and translation into their own cultures. It was also interesting to see the different regional differences in Spanish within the group, there were Venezuelans, Argentinians, Mexicans, Chileans and Spaniards in the group, and each had different colloquial Spanish, sometimes we would discuss certain meanings about regional terms and also how they related to English.

      Did you find any difficulties with your ‘insider’ role?

      I did, some ethical issues popped up for me when taking screen shots of the discussion and thoughts about sharing them were most definitely present. As I became more involved with the group I felt that I may have been leading discussions in a certain way and perhaps influencing things somehow. Possibly the role of lurker would have been more rewarding in this study.

      Did you disclose to the group that you were a ‘researcher’?

      In the discussion forum, at the very start, I introduced myself and stated my aims and hopes for the course. This was a bit of a cop out as for anyone to fully understand my aims they would have had to gone back and read what I was trying to do.

      Reply
  2. mprowse

    Hi Martyn, Thanks for your earlier comment on my Kozinets post by the way. I am also intrigued by the way L2 pushes an x MOOC over the boundary to a subset c MOOC- this has interesting implications as Jeremy points out. Thanks for your mini- ethnography and artefact.

    Reply
  3. PJ Fameli

    Matryn, aoplogies for delay in commenting. What I found interesting in your ethnography is the notion of participants in this particular MOOC to be seemingly using it as a ‘networking’ tool; almost as if a ‘hybrid’ between xMOOC, CMOOC, and professional networking sites like LinkIn. Your ethnography highlights potential for further research into cross-cultural perspectives on MOOCs, such as: Are native Spanish speakers more or less active than English speakers in MOOC online communities? Also, on Jeremy’s point above about the ‘massive’ nature of MOOCs and your fous on a ‘smaller community.’ A taxonomy of the activitiy levels of the various smaller communities within the MOOC would be interesting. Cheers, PJ

    Reply
    1. Martyn Post author

      I completely agree, the networking side of thing was most definitely highlighted. At one point a participant mentioned that he had made lots of professional friends through previous MOOCs on Coursera, I also received new friend requests on LinkedIN. The discussion moved to Skype where there are weekly discussion on the course content. I think it would be a really interesting idea to study the impact of language on MOOCs.

      Reply

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