A dicursive-material perspctive on learning design and pedagogic agency in three edX MOOCs

Zienkowski, Jan;Lambotte, François
(2022) EARLI SIG 6&7 Conference 2022: Multidisciplinary perspectives on instructional design and technology across all educational leve — Location: Bern (22.August.2022)

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Design and learning design are often dealt with as deliberate or intentional processes, conceptualized as the “deliberate shaping of form in response to function” (Mor and Craft 2012, 86) or as “an act of devising new practices, plans of activity, resources and tools aimed at achieving particular educational aims in a given situation” (Mor and Craft 2012, 89) . Such instrumental or intentional notions of design assume that pedagogic agency somehow pre-exists the tools and platforms through which it operates. In this paper we propose an alternative perspective. We understand agency and design as outcomes of a process whereby teaching team members reflexively engage with the affordances and limitations of technopedagogical platforms. We propose to consider learning design as an outcome of partially reflexive attempts to weave the constitutive elements of a MOOC into a coherent project, drawing on relational and discursive-material perspectives on agency developed in the fields of communication, science, and technology studies. Agency emerges through articulations of educational objectives, technological affordances, discursive, and institutional realities. It can be understood as a limited but productive ability to (re)configure aspects of discursive-material reality. In this paper we aim to demonstrate that pedagogic agency and design decisions emerge as teaching team members knot (themselves into) their MOOCs with varying degrees of reflexivity. The metaphor of MOOCs as discursive-material knots is key to the analysis presented here. To demonstrate the value of our relational and discursive-material perspective on MOOCs we will present analyses of interviews conducted with teaching team members of three SSH MOOCs. These MOOCs differ in terms of subject matter and in terms of the pedagogical approach. These MOOCs were not developed with formal learning models in mind, but this does not mean that their teaching teams did not reflect on the design of their courses. As we will see, they were highly aware of the possibilities and constraints offered by the edX dispositive, as well as of its impact on learning design decisions. Our interviews did not explicitly address learning design. They focused on the conceptualization of MOOCs and the role attributed to the forums. Our interviews focused on: (1) the reasons teaching teams have for designing a MOOC; (2) the pedagogic ideas they would like to put into practice; (3) evaluations of the edX dispositive and its components; and (4) forum uses and functions. As such, the interviews contain a wide range of highly reflexive post-hoc statements on the way teaching team members conceive the design of their MOOCs, the overall edX dispositive, and their agency with respect to both.
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Zienkowski, J., & Lambotte, F. (2022). A dicursive-material perspctive on learning design and pedagogic agency in three edX MOOCs. EARLI SIG 6&7 Conference 2022: Multidisciplinary perspectives on instructional design and technology across all educational leve, Bern.