For the last four years, the RELIEF center has been designing and developing MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) with several partners based in Lebanon and in different regions of the world on different topics that are up-to-date with people’s current interests and needs. In this series of blogs, we’re going to present the best practices, challenges, and lessons learned from our experience working on MOOCs delivered in English and Arabic. By sharing our experience, we hope to play an important role in online learning for adults and bring you new ideas, whether you work in the online learning field or plan to do so.
Picture 1. A filming day in Bekaa, Lebanon, for the Community Based Research MOOC.
What do videos bring to MOOCs?
Videos are a major component of the MOOCs’ learning design. Videos allow participants to relate to other people working in their profession since interviewees share their innovative and informative ideas, challenges, and best practices in their field. One of the Transforming Education in Challenging Environments MOOC (TECE) participants said:
The experiences shared by the teachers in the videos and the solutions that they provided were very helpful; they are like us! They are working with minimum supplies; they gave us a lot of good ideas on how we can overcome this and design very interesting activities. These were very fun to learn about (Biology teacher).
In addition, when exercises are designed to follow videos they allow participants to interact with the video content through activities and open discussions that tackle the ideas mentioned in the videos. Supporting online learning communities and the sharing of experience among MOOC participants is an important topic that we will be talking about more in depth in this series of blogs. So, stay tuned!
How did we do it?
It all began with the Community Based Research MOOC in the summer of 2018. Understanding how to create videos was a learning process for us. As mentioned before, videos in MOOCs have the potential to channel experts’ knowledge to a different and wider range of people.
This course is about how to do community-based research to improve the wellbeing and prosperity of people in a community. We also used this approach to develop the course. We worked with local community leaders and staff from NGOs, who gave us examples of how they worked to bring different kinds of benefits to their communities. With the help of the filming crew and the MOOC content team, we were able to channel these examples through videos. They allowed participants to find people from different parts of the world in various contexts that have similar or different challenges to theirs and could benefit from collaborating on possible solutions.
Another type of videos that we have included in the MOOCs are tutorials. The tutorials were added to the MOOCs based on the needs of the participants. We noted from the participants’ feedback through surveys and comments, that they are facing challenges using different tools that we introduced in the course. The tutorials were added to support participants in their learning and minimize their challenges in online learning as much as possible. Tutorials have been some of the most popular content in our MOOCs.
Picture 2. Screenshot taken from a tutorial in the Transforming Education in Challenging Environments MOOC. Step 4.8 A learning design tool for teachers.
How did COVID-19 change our work?
Similarly to every type of learning around the world, the coronavirus lockdown has had a huge impact on our MOOCs’ design and delivery. Our inability to move freely and have in-person meetings with the interviewees changed our way of creating videos. The interviews were conducted and recorded via Zoom or any other online tool. Based on the interviewees’ preference, we would share the interview questions with them and they would record the interview themselves, or we would have a live one-on-one interview.
Picture 3. Natalie Garland, Partnership & Research Manager at MAPS in Bekaa, Lebanon, talks about a community-based participatory research project that MAPS designed and conducted during the coronavirus lockdown. Screenshot of Natalie’s video in the Community Based Research MOOC Step 2.10 Participatory Research through Photovoice.
For example, for additional steps for our Community Based Research MOOC, we asked MAPS, our co-design partner, for an interview, to give us updates on their research on the WEAVED project (Women’s Empowerment Agency through Visual Expression and Dialogue). The overall aim of their research was to capture women’s daily experiences and the impact of economic empowerment and crochet on their lives and identity. This participatory project was actually inspired by the lockdown in order to create a project to conduct research while also keeping the community connected during such a difficult time.
Picture 4. A picture of a crochet from a woman's work on the WEAVED project shared by the MAPS team to be used as a B-roll in one of the videos.
Although the research team faced several challenges, one of the major takeaways from this project was realizing how remote research requires a unique adaptive approach. At the end of the project, the team noticed how this research helped strengthen social networks and really reduce the deep sense of isolation caused by the lockdown and the many layers of crisis in Lebanon.
The participants really needed an outlet to speak openly and to feel listened to and supported. They expressed so much pride in seeing people liking, commenting, and engaging with their photographs that were posted on Instagram. And it became a fun way to keep the crochet community connected and engaged. Whether it was using Instagram, Zoom, or WhatsApp, a mixture of these different digital tools was leveraging the power of exchange between participants.
Since MOOCs are a reflection of the reality that people live in, we felt that we needed to share with the participants different case studies on how other people working in different fields are handling this challenging situation. MOOCs not only provide quality education that benefits participants, but also build an online learning community during lockdown, helping people have a type of learning experience that benefits them across different fields of their daily lives.
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