Supporting professional learning in a massive open online course

Colin Milligan,Allison Littlejohn

doi:10.19173/irrodl.v15i5.1855

Abstract

<p>Professional learning, combining formal and on the job learning, is important for the development and maintenance of expertise in the modern workplace. To integrate formal and informal learning, professionals have to have good self-regulatory ability. Formal learning opportunities are opening up through massive open online courses (MOOCs), providing free and flexible access to formal education for millions of learners worldwide. MOOCs present a potentially useful mechanism for supporting and enabling professional learning, allowing opportunities to link formal and informal learning. However, there is limited understanding of their effectiveness as professional learning environments. Using self-regulated learning as a theoretical base, this study investigated the learning behaviours of health professionals within Fundamentals of Clinical Trials, a MOOC offered by edX. Thirty-five semi-structured interviews were conducted and analysed to explore how the design of this MOOC supported professional learning to occur. The study highlights a mismatch between learning intentions and learning behaviour of professional learners in this course. While the learners are motivated to participate by specific role challenges, their learning effort is ultimately focused on completing course tasks and assignments. The study found little evidence of professional learners routinely relating the course content to their job role or work tasks, and little impact of the course on practice. This study adds to the overall understanding of learning in MOOCs and provides additional empirical data to a nascent research field. The findings provide an insight into how professional learning could be integrated with formal, online learning. </p>

Highlights

Professional work and learning are deeply intertwined
RQ2: What learning behaviours do professionals exhibit while learning in the massive open online courses (MOOCs)? This question examines the ways professional learners interact with the course materials, other learners, and members of their professional network as they learn during the performance phase
This study surfaces some of the benefits and issues with MOOCs as a form of professional learning

Summary

Introduction

Professional work and learning are deeply intertwined. Where learning at work takes the form of formal, deliberate training or development it is easy to identify as ‘learning’. Non-formal learning embedded in everyday work activities is more difficult to recognise as ‘learning’ (Eraut, 2000). Both forms of learning, formal and nonformal, are important for the development of different forms of expertise. Theoretical expertise may be learned through deliberate effort, while practical expertise is learned ‘on the job’. The interweaving of professional practice and professional learning offers a new basis for how we think about work, education, and learning (Beckett & Hager, 2002)

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Results

Conclusion