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This paper explores how the use of digital practice spaces (DPSs) can inform teacher preparation through a reimagining of clinical practice in teacher preparation by addressing the question: what roles might DPSs play in the ecology of apprenticeship opportunities for future educators? We leveraged AACTE’s Essential Proclamations and Tenets for Highly Effective Clinical Educator Preparation as an analytical framework to examine our own experiences using DPSs in our teacher education coursework. We discuss the alignment between these proclamations and the theoretical, conceptual, and practical underpinnings of DPSs. Finally, we consider the remaining proclamations that represent the horizons of DPSs within teacher preparation, a task we undertook as a set of informed provocations, envisioning how DPSs could be designed to support the proclamations not currently supported.

Preregistration and registered reports are two promising open science practices for increasing transparency in the scientific process. In particular, they create transparency around one of the most consequential distinctions in research design: the data analytics decisions made before data collection and post-hoc decisions made afterwards. Preregistration involves publishing a time-stamped record of a study design before data collection or analysis. Registered reports are a publishing approach that facilitates the evaluation of research without regard for the direction or magnitude of findings. In this paper, I evaluate opportunities and challenges for these open science methods, offer initial guidelines for their use, explore relevant tensions around new practices, and illustrate examples from educational psychology and social science. This paper was accepted for publication in Educational Psychologist volume 56, issue 2; scheduled for April 2021, as a part of a special issue titled, “Educational psychology in the open science era.”This preprint has been peer reviewed, but not copy edited by the journal and may differ from the final published version. The DOI of the final published version is: [insert preprint DOI number]. Once the article is published online, it will be available at the following permanent link: [insert doi link]

For decades, technology advocates have claimed that we are on the cusp of a complete transformation in education. But, as Justin Reich explains, such transformations have not yet come to pass. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers did not use technology to significantly alter their teaching. Instead, technology enabled them to maintain many of their classroom routines (using learning management systems or video conferencing) or supplement their usual instruction (using gamified apps). Teachers did, however, tinker with their methods throughout the pandemic, gradually improving over time. Reich suggests that this tinkering framework is a more realistic way to think about ed tech’s potential to support teaching and learning.

Given the widespread evidence of discriminatory behavior and widening racial disparities, it is imperative that educators address systemic inequities in education. Clinical simulations are a promising vehicle for helping educators identify and disrupt inequity in teaching. We developed a short digital learning intervention—a digital clinical simulation (DCS) and associated asynchronous video-based simulation debrief (VD). We studied the effectiveness of each component of this intervention using a staggered randomized experiment within the first unit of an 8-week online professional development course (N = 787). We found no statistically significant differences in equity beliefs between participants in the two experimental conditions of the study (DCS-only, and DCS + VD) and the control condition. In a qualitative analysis of reflection responses, we found that only 26.2% participants independently showed some evidence of equity-based reasoning in their simulation post-DCS self-reflections, but that 42.9%\showed some evidence of equity-based reasoning in their post-VD self-reflection. These findings suggest that shifts toward equity might not manifest immediately after the digital clinical simulation. More research is needed on how digital clinical simulations may affect the trajectories of equity development and what effects other components, such as personalize.

Comprender las experiencias de los estudiantes y docentes durante la escolarización durante la pandemia es vital para la recuperación educativa y una mejor reconstrucción. En la primavera de 2021, cuando se acercaba el cierre del año escolar, realizamos tres ejercicios de investigación: 1) invitamos a 200 maestros a entrevistar a sus alumnos sobre el año pasado y compartir sus hallazgos, 2) entrevistamos a 50 maestros de aula y 3) llevamos a cabo diez charlas de diseño de múltiples partes interesadas con estudiantes, maestros, líderes escolares y familiares para comenzar a planificar el año de recuperación 2021-2022. En lugar de un "regreso a la normalidad" o el objetivo de una "pérdida de aprendizaje" estrechamente concebida, los estudiantes y educadores de nuestro estudio enfatizaron temas de curación, comunidad y humanidad como aprendizajes clave del año de la pandemia y valores esenciales para la reconstrucción de las escuelas. . Recomendamos que en el año 2021-2022, las escuelas creen estructuras para que los miembros de la comunidad reflexionen sobre el año de la pandemia, celebren la resiliencia, lloren por lo que se ha perdido e imaginen cómo las lecciones aprendidas de un año tumultuoso pueden informar sistemas escolares más equitativos y resilientes. para el futuro. Brindamos orientación sobre cuatro protocolos de reflexión para usar en las comunidades escolares para avanzar en este trabajo.

In an increasingly polarized digital landscape, evaluating online information has become a critical media literacy skill. Many individuals have difficulty distinguishing satirical from legitimate news sources [1]. One useful strategy is lateral reading, looking up information about a website or social media account in order to judge its credibility from an outside source [2]. We developed a short lateral reading task where we asked users to evaluate the trustworthiness of the satire account @GOPTeens and explain their response in a short text response. We developed a natural language processing classifier to detect whether users correctly identified the account as a satire account, which would indicate that they employed lateral reading to evaluate the trustworthiness of the account. This classifier examines a very specific case and the NLP classifier was highly accurate with a Macro F1 statistic of 0.96 (Overall Macro F1 = 0.96, Yes F1 = 0.99, No F1 = 0.94). In future work, we will employ the classifier to provide targeted feedback to users and will explore the effects of facilitative versus directive feedback on performance with lateral reading tasks.

We summarize the results of a field scan that set out to describe the current state of math teacher learning and promising future directions for improving math teaching and learning for all learners, particularly those most underestimated by the education system. We share five key learnings: (1) math teacher learning is in a "steady state," where schools and districts generally use three approaches to support math educators: professional learning communities (PLCs), instructional coaching, and professional learning workshops, (2) researchers have not been able to document a strong link between each of these three approaches and teacher and student learning, with the exception of coaching which shows benefits for teachers but not direct evidence of student learning, (3) comprehensive programs that apply several of these approaches simultaneously with sufficient supports can improve math outcomes for students, but gains often dissipate when supports decline, (4) there are a few "points of light" of innovative new approaches including teacher-led learning innovations, teacher pipeline initiatives, practice-embedded models, and digital clinical simulations, and (5) there are opportunities for new initiatives in math education to pay greater attention to the implications for teacher learning. We discuss important critiques of our report and offer a "call to action" for stakeholders in the field.

To develop an in-depth, nuanced understanding of what teaching was like during the COVID-impacted 2020-21 academic school year, we interviewed 57 U.S. PK-12 teachers from across the country in public, charter, and private schools, at different grade levels, and in different subject areas. The primary message we heard from teachers is that they have not been valued as partners in designing our educational response to COVID. Specifically, the following three themes emerged from our interviews: 1.) exclusion from decision-making processes is demoralizing to teachers, especially when combined with worsening working conditions and widening inequalities; 2.) ignoring the concerns of teachers led to policymakers and school leaders advancing several seriously ill-considered ideas over the objections of practicing teachers; and 3.) teachers have developed a variety of effective instructional strategies in response to the challenging conditions of COVID. Delta is already disrupting school openings across the country. The school systems with the most effective approaches to pandemic schooling over the next year and beyond will be those that listen seriously to the concerns and insights of teachers and include them in design and decision-making.

Interactive simulations allow preservice teachers to connect education theory and pedagogy in scaffolded environments. We created digital simulations with scenarios from in-person simulatio...

Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educational recovery and building back better. In the spring of 2021 as the school year was coming to close, we conducted three research exercises: 1) we invited 200 teachers to interview their students about the past year and share their findings, 2) we interviewed 50 classroom teachers, and 3) we conducted ten multistakeholder design charrettes with students, teachers, school leaders, and family members to begin planning for the 2021-2022 recovery year. Rather than a "return to normal" or the targeting of a narrowly-conceived "learning loss," the students and educators in our study emphasized themes of healing, community, and humanity as key learnings from the pandemic year and essential values to rebuilding schools. We recommend that in the 2021-2022 year, schools create structures for community members to reflect on the pandemic year, celebrate resilience, grieve what has been lost, and imagine how the lessons learned from a tumultuous year can inform more equitable, resilient school systems for the future. We provide guidance on four reflection protocols to use in school communities to advance this work.

Teacher Moments is an open source platform that allows the authoring of simulations used for education which we recently revised to integrate intelligent coaching agents. The initial simulation development for Teacher Moments focused on teacher education, but the platform is actively used for professional development with nurses, psychologists, police officers, judges, and attorneys. Simulations can range in complexity from single-user simulations to multi-user role-play simulations. Single-user simulations provide opportunities for participants to respond using text or audio inputs while multiuser simulations extend those response types to include chat functionality. To support participant learning, Teacher Moments simulations can now be configured to include intelligent coaching agents that review participant inputs, identify salient patterns in text or speech, and respond with feedback and coaching supports. Teacher Moments can be configured to incorporate text or audio binary classifiers or include conversational agents into the chat feature. Once a classifier is configured there is functionality to dynamically display content based on audio or text classification when authoring the simulation. In addition, conversational agents can interject comments into the chat directed at either a particular participant or to all participants in a chat. Finally, there is a new integrated labeling component that supports collecting binary labels from participants for text or audio data, which can be used either to validate the accuracy of a classifier or to establish training data for a classifier. In this demo, we will: 1) highlight GitHub repositories designed to support the deployment of classifiers that can be integrated into Teacher Moments; 2) demonstrate a conversational agent integrated into the chat feature to provide intelligent supports; 3) illustrate how binary classification can trigger the dynamic display of content providing options for dynamic learning supports; and 4) demonstrate how the labeling component can be used for either validation of a classifier or collection of training data.

The public schoolhouse is one of the few remaining public spaces in which citizens may routinely gather to discuss controversial issues. Furthermore, it is social studies classrooms and teachers, in particular, that bear the moral imperative to ensure such civic discourse takes place. Nevertheless, many social studies teachers refrain from centering such discussions in their classrooms, often for fear of reprisal should these discussions go awry. It thus falls to social studies teacher educators to rethink how we prepare future teachers. This paper reports on a study that incorporated digital simulations of controversial issues into three preservice social studies teacher preparation methods courses to help develop high-leverage practices associated with leading whole-group discussions. Case study analysis suggests participants developed greater fluency with the teacher moves they practiced in the simulation. Accordingly, participants’ developed greater confidence with and perceived importance of facilitating discussions of controversial issues in their future classrooms. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) have become popular in various regions of the world through the years. Since 2008, this phenomenon has received plenty of attention from higher education and universities across countries began to produce these courses. The countries of Europe and the United States are the world’s leading producers of MOOCs and research studies reporting on this topic. This previous research has focused on (1) analysing data from global providers such as edX, Coursera or FutureLearn; (2) describing learners’ characteristics from a small sample of courses in these regions; and (3) offering overviews of courses and platforms. However, research in other regions such as Latin America or Africa are very scarce. As a consequence, little is known about local initiatives in Latin America region, and about the needs and characteristics of its learners. Moreover, this has generated an unequal and biased perspective of what we know today about MOOC learners. To close this inequality gap, this work, presents a cross-platform exploratory study in Latin America, using data from more than three million learners and seven different MOOC providers to generate a joint comparable analysis about students’ characteristics in this region with others regions in the world. Preliminary results report on the differences and similarities of trends based on level of education, age, gender of students, their level of activity and performance of learners in Latin America through the different providers of MOOCs. These results help us understand the MOOC ecosystem in Latin America and report results to the entire community, while at the same time calling for more large-scale studies between researchers and institutions.

Digital clinical simulations (DCSs) are a promising tool for professional learning on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues across a variety of fields. Although digital clinical simulations can be integrated into large-scale learning environments, less is known about how to design these types of simulations so they can scale effectively. We describe the results of two studies of a digital clinical simulation tool called Jeremy's Journal. In Study 1, we implemented this simulation in an in-person workshop with a human facilitator. We found that participants described their learning experiences positively and reported changes in attitudes. In Study 2, we used the simulation within an online course but replaced the human facilitator with an asynchronous, text-based adaptation of the facilitation script. Although learners in Study 2 described the experience in the simulation positively, we did not observe changes in attitudes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the design of DCSs at scale.

To more deeply understand the practice and professional experiences of educators during the 2020 extended school closures, we interviewed 40 teachers from across the country in public, charter, and private schools, at different grade levels, and in different subject areas. From our conversations, three key themes emerged: 1) Student Motivation: Teachers struggled to motivate their students through two layers of computer screens; 2) Professional Loss and Burnout: As they lost familiar means of teaching, teachers also lost a fundamental sense of their own efficacy and professional identity; and, 3) Exacerbated Inequities: This sense of loss grew deeper as teachers witnessed the dramatic intensification of the societal inequalities that had always shaped their students’ lives. Effective planning for school reopening in Fall 2020 will require understanding and addressing these challenges facets of teachers’ experience. We propose five design considerations to plan for resilience: center equity, focus on relationship-building, address student motivation, address staff motivation and burnout, and mitigate uncertainty.Full, de-identified transcripts of most teacher interviews are available at https://osf.io/2fjtc/. Other researchers who have interviewed teachers this spring and summer are encouraged to share their data there as well.

Many higher education institutions have begun offering opportunities to earn credit for in-person courses through massive open online courses (MOOCs). This mixed-methods study examines the experiences of students participating in one of the first iterations of this trend: a blended professional master's degree program that admitted students based on performance in MOOC-based online courses. We found that the blended master's program attracted a cohort of highly educated mid-career professionals from developed countries who were looking for more flexible alternatives to traditional graduate programs. Success in the online courses was correlated with higher levels of prior formal education and effective use of learning strategies. Students who enrolled in the blended graduate program reported being academically prepared for their coursework and had higher GPAs (3.86, p

In March of 2020, we launched Becoming a More Equitable Educator, a free online course for educators about anti-racist teaching, educator mindsets, and equity teaching practices. This report describes the design of the course, the experience of participants, and early research findings.

In May 2020, we facilitated four online design charrettes with a variety of school stakeholders—students, teachers, principals, district leaders, parents, consultants, state officials, and others—to develop a design process for fall 2020 school planning. We describe these charrettes and provide resources for facilitating similar events in an additional report at https://edarxiv.org/ufr4q: Imagining September: Online Design Charrettes for Fall 2020 Planning with Students and Stakeholders.This report shares insights from those design meetings. First we identified seven themes that emerged from our design charrettes:1. Relationships are the Foundation of Schooling2. Liberatory Approaches to Equity3. Amplifying Student Agency4. Marie Kondo-ing School Priorities5. Building Time will be Gold6. Nurturing Home and Community Learning7. Iterative Organizational LearningFor each of these principles, we developed a small set of “storyboards,” short vignettes of future class- room life in the 2020-2021 school year as told from students and faculty. Through these stories, educators can begin to imagine what hybrid schooling might look like next year.These storyboards range widely in grain size from “tentpole” ideas that could organize a school’s entire reopening plan to smaller programmatic pieces that could fit into many different types of responses. It would be nearly impossible to include all of these design elements in a single reopening plan, and some of them contradict one another. However, reviewing these storyboards can help school communities begin their own process of storytelling about schooling next year.

In May 2020, we conducted four online design charrettes with school and district leaders, teachers, students, parents, and other stakeholders to translate design-based practices for leading school change into an online context. In this report, we present two meeting protocols: one for multi-stakeholder meetings and one primarily for students. To accompany these protocols, we have sample agenda, online workbooks, and sample notes and exercises from our discussion to help school and district leaders facilitate these kinds of meetings in their own local contexts.The goal of these meetings was to identify shared values and priorities for reopening schools, to build stakeholder engagement, to seed stakeholder leadership and involvement, and to develop new ideas and structures for reopening schools. In particular, we were interested in “tentpole” ideas, structures and routines that could define a reopening plan and provide an organizational frame for the hundreds of smaller curricular, programmatic, and logistical decisions that will need to be made next year. In a linked report-- “Imagining September: Principles and Design Elements for Ambitious Schools during Covid-19”- -we have published “storyboards” for a variety of school reopening ideas and structures inspired by the participants in our charrettes.Re-opening schools in the fall will be a community-wide effort, requiring leadership, innovation, and experimentation from all parts of school systems. Including diverse stakeholders early in the process of imagining September will bring forth a community’s best ideas and invite people through the system to join the work of retooling schools for the challenging year ahead.

Significance Low persistence in educational programs is a major obstacle to social mobility. Scientists have proposed many scalable interventions to support students learning online. In one of the largest international field experiments in education, we iteratively tested established behavioral science interventions and found small benefits depending on individual and contextual characteristics. Forecasting intervention efficacy using state-of-the-art methods yields limited improvements. Online education provides unprecedented access to learning opportunities, as evidenced by its role during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, but adequately supporting diverse students will require more than a light-touch intervention. Our findings encourage funding agencies and researchers conducting large-scale field trials to consider dynamic investigations to uncover and design for contextual heterogeneity to complement static investigations of overall effects., Online education is rapidly expanding in response to rising demand for higher and continuing education, but many online students struggle to achieve their educational goals. Several behavioral science interventions have shown promise in raising student persistence and completion rates in a handful of courses, but evidence of their effectiveness across diverse educational contexts is limited. In this study, we test a set of established interventions over 2.5 y, with one-quarter million students, from nearly every country, across 247 online courses offered by Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford. We hypothesized that the interventions would produce medium-to-large effects as in prior studies, but this is not supported by our results. Instead, using an iterative scientific process of cyclically preregistering new hypotheses in between waves of data collection, we identified individual, contextual, and temporal conditions under which the interventions benefit students. Self-regulation interventions raised student engagement in the first few weeks but not final completion rates. Value-relevance interventions raised completion rates in developing countries to close the global achievement gap, but only in courses with a global gap. We found minimal evidence that state-of-the-art machine learning methods can forecast the occurrence of a global gap or learn effective individualized intervention policies. Scaling behavioral science interventions across various online learning contexts can reduce their average effectiveness by an order-of-magnitude. However, iterative scientific investigations can uncover what works where for whom.

How can large-scale online learning serve professionals' learning needs which are often highly localized? In this mixed-methods study, we examine this question through studying the learning experiences of participants in four massive open online courses (MOOCs) that we developed on educational change leadership (N = 1,712). We observed that participants were able to integrate their learning from the online courses across a variety of settings. We argue that a key factor in this process was that the design of online courses was attentive to the various levels in which participants processed and applied their learning. We therefore propose the “Content-Collaboration-Context" model ("C-C-C") as a framework for designing and researching open online learning experiences for professional learning settings where participants’ work is highly localized. In analyzing learner experiences in our MOOCs, we apply this framework to illustrate how individuals integrated the generalized content of the online courses into their context-specific practices. We conclude with implications for the design and research on online professional learning experiences.

We analyze the state education agency policy guidance concerning remote learning published by all 50 U.S. states by the end of March 2020. We find several areas of consensus, including cancellation of testing, recommendations to continue some form of remote learning, attention to digital and non-digital options, and a concerns for providing a fair and appropriate education for students with disabilities. The primary area of policy divergence that we found regarded the purpose of continuous learning during a pandemic: whether to pursue forward progress in standards-aligned new material or whether to pursue skills review and enrichment learning. We recommend that states continue to emphasize equity, consider the particular challenges of home-based learning, and produce concise communications for multiple target audiences.

While there is growing interest among educators in bringing the maker movement into school environments, many schools struggle to closely integrate making into their existing core curriculum, mostly due to the difficulty in assessing learning in maker classrooms. Because of the unique nature of maker-centered learning as a pedagogy, conventional assessment methods often fall short. To address this issue, we conducted a study to design assessment in maker classrooms using a design-based research approach, working closely with middle school maker teachers and coaches. Applying the concept of embedded assessment that is commonly used in digital learning environments into in-person maker classrooms, we explored how assessment that captures diverse learning occur in the process of making. This paper reports on the four design principles of embedded assessment in school-based making that emerged from literature reviews as well as interviews and workshops with the partnering educators. By closely examining the contexts of maker classrooms, we discuss challenges and opportunities for assessment in maker classrooms that can help teachers approach assessment as activities that are seamlessly embedded in the classroom culture, norms, and activities that students are engaged in.

In a design-based implementation study, we supported 11 teacher educators from diverse institutions across the country in implementing new approaches to practice-based teacher education. We observed that teacher educators proceeded through a developmental process in implementing new approaches, and we propose the Practice Based Teacher Education (PBTE) Engagement Ladder as a model of this process. Teacher educators proceed through stages of Adoption, Adaptation, and Redesign, as they shift from “off-the-shelf” implementations of PBTE approaches in individual lessons and units, towards more ambitious modifications of courses and eventually, program and curricula. This developmental process of teacher educator learning and change builds on prior research about teacher adoption of technology-enhanced pedagogies. We illustrate this developmental process through a series of case studies, and we conclude with a set of design hypotheses for promoting the adoption of PBTE approaches across the diverse landscape of teacher education.

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd Recent studies of massive open online courses (MOOCs) have focused on global providers such as edX, Coursera, and FutureLearn, with less attention to local initiatives that target regional learners. In this study we combine data from the main edX platform and one regional MOOC provider, Edraak in Jordan, to explore differences in learners’ behavior and preferences. We find that regional provider Edraak attracts younger learners, more females and those with lower levels of education compared to global providers. Edraak learners value local courses because they cater to their interests and learning needs. We document our multi-platform learning analytics procedure, where we establish a common data format and script that enables an “apples-to-apples” comparison without exchanging data — a common privacy and data security concern. These findings suggest the potential of this methodological approach to study and learn from regional MOOC providers, particularly around the questions of equity and access in the global MOOC ecosystem.

Compared to other helping professions, teacher training typically lacks sufficient opportunities for novices to practice new skills. When teachers learn, they listen to people talk about teaching, or talk about teaching themselves, but they very rarely do the work of teaching. Games and simulations offer a promising framework to advance practice-based professional training for complex skills such as teaching. In this work, we built a role-playing simulation ELK to help teachers develop effective questioning strategies to elicit learner prior knowledge. We evaluate ELK with 76 pre-service teachers in two modes, one is more akin to the kind of human-human interaction that is germane to teaching but requires more human resources and one that can be done independently. We find that in both cases ELK raises awareness about student misconceptions and the importance of student thinking, and teachers demonstrate a modest increase in effective questioning strategies after three rounds of playing.

Web 2.0 refers to a suite of technologies that have dramatically lowered the interaction costs of two-way communication over the World Wide Web, which has democratized the production of information and applications across the internet. To sum up the Web 2.0 phenomena in a sentence: lower communication costs have led to opportunities for more inclusive, collaborative, democratic online participation. As the costs of communicating online decreased, more people, in terms of million, decided that it was worth their while to participate in these communication networks. These people did not just communicate more, they started communicating in qualitatively different ways than before. As these millions found new media for expression and collaboration, they opened possibilities for a more inclusive, open, democratic society, possibilities which may or may not be realized.There is no doubt that this democratization, these contributions from many millions of web participants, has produced a series of profound social, political and economic changes that this paper will seek to document. The changes inspired by the democratization of the web, however, will not of necessity lead to a more equitable distribution of power and resources in our society. The future of the web will depend upon the degree to which this blossoming of online participation will allow ordinary citizens and consumers to have greater voice and influence in shaping society and the degree to which powerful political and commercial interests can co-opt and constrain the surge of online enthusiasm in the support of the established hierarchy.

Competency-Based Education: The Why, What, and How (January 31-March 13, 2019) was amassive open online course (MOOC) that invited learners to consider the nature of competency-basededucation (CBE), why schools pursue it, and the opportunities and challenges educators and others facewhen implementing it. The course featured schools at various stages of implementing competencybased education, including Crosstown High (a member of the cohort of XQ schools in Tennessee, USA),Montpelier High School (Vermont, USA), and Noble High School (Maine, USA). Nearly 4,000 educatorsand others from across the United States and 120+ countries enrolled and many engaged inreflective activities and assignments, notablyworking towards the creation of an artifact thatwould support a conversation around CBE with astakeholder in their context.

The mission of the Teaching Systems Lab is to design, implement and research the future of teacher learning. Between 2017 and 2019, the lab released four MOOCs on change leadership, including Launching Innovation in Schools, Design Thinking for Leading and Learning, Envisioning the Graduate of the Future, and Competency-Based Education: The What, Why and How. This submission is a compendium of review papers describing findings from six instantiations of these four courses.

Although maker-centered learning in schools has grown rapidly in recent years, the existing assessment approaches often do not meet the needs in assessing the multifaceted learning and development that occur in making processes. This short research paper reports on the design principles of embedded assessment and shares insights gained from working with middle school teachers developing, testing, and examining an embedded assessment toolkit consisting of seven assessment tools and activities., National Science Foundation (Grant 1723450)

Now is the time for educational technology to shine, but it simply isn't good enough and is unlikely to be so soon, says Justin Reich

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) came into the educational ecosystem attracting the attention of the public media, businesses, teachers, and learners from all over the world. The original courses were completely open and free, targeting the worldwide population. However, current MOOC providers have pivoted towards more private directions, and we often find that MOOC materials are completely closed within their hosting platforms and cannot be retrieved from them by their learners. This diminishes the potential of MOOCs by making content available to a small proportion of learners and severely limits the reusability of the educational resources. In this paper, we present a process that we call &lsquo, unMOOCing&rsquo, in which we transform the resources of a MOOC into OERs. We taught a MOOC on Open Education in the UNED Abierta platform, and we &lsquo, unMOOCed&rsquo, all of its educational resources, making them available to download by the learners that are taking the course. The results of the unMOOCing were very encouraging: the possibility of downloading the course resources was the most highly rated component of the course. Additionally, the two unMOOCed materials that were considered as most useful (presentations and contents in a PDF) were downloaded by 90% of the learners. Now that the majority of MOOC providers are moving towards a more closed educational approach, we believe that this paper sends a powerful message for bringing back the original MOOC concept of &lsquo, Openness&rsquo, with the unMOOCing process, thus contributing to the wider dissemination and democratization of education across the globe.

What happened to disruptive transformation of education?