Week 7 – Reflections
The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture
A micro-ethnographic reflection on MOOC participant silence
Background
Public fascination with superhero movies is, according to Statisa, currently skyrocketing (Watson, 2019) while interest in traditional superhero comics appears to be on the wane (Salkovitz, 2019). With participation numbers regularly averaging 20,000 plus, the Smithsonian Institution’s six-hour MOOC ‘The Rise of Superheroes and Their Impact On Pop Culture’ (launched in 2015 and delivered through EdX) would, however, appear to suggest that interest in superhero comics remains strong.
Initial internet searches confirmed enormous interest in and engagement with film-related superhero content so I believed that I would encounter a large degree of engagement by the thousands of participants on my chosen MOOC, and that the exchanges would provide fertile ground for a micro-ethnographic study of the superfan community’s preferred modes of interaction.
MOOC Content and Architecture
The self-paced, five-week course would address:
- The history and origins of the first superheroes and comic books, and how they changed over time.
- The evolution of American society from the Depression to today, as viewed through the lens of the comic book genre.
- How the current globalization and diversity of the next generation of superheroes.
(EdX, 2020)
The simple course architecture comprised a blend of short texts and videos, a reading ’list’ and an end-of-week task.
Interaction
It was made clear from the outset that there would be no tutor support since ‘this is a self-paced course, the Discussion board is not actively monitored’ (EdX, 2020). The lack of student-tutor interaction was not a major concern to me as my aim was to analyse student-student interaction. I did not, however, expect the course ‘Community Page’ to encourage me to interact with others on external social media platforms. I did not expect a self-paced MOOC with no tutor mediation whatsoever to attempt to create a sense of community by recommending social media interaction on Facebook or Twitte.
My first visit to the course discussion board was unsettling. If there were over 20,000 participants taking this course why were there only a handful of recent posts? I was initially surprised at the lack of recent posts and that most of the historic (months old) posts had elicited little, if any, response. Closer inspection of the posts suggested that each participant had his or her own strong agenda as the majority were personal comments presented as one word or single sentence contributions that did little to invite engagement. Many were completely unrelated to the course, but this was not unexpected given the course designer’s encouragement to participants to ‘start their own topics’ n.p. (Uslan, 2015).
It was clear that I would be unable to analyse the behaviour of even a few of my fellow participants as there were so few of them contributing meaningfully to the discussion board. I considered taking a new MOOC, but decided to persevere with the course and to focus on examining this online ‘community’s’ silence and lack of interaction.
As an experienced course designer, I did not feel that this MOOC merited the title of ‘course’. With no clear learning objectives, it was simply a mix of weekly readings and video excerpts that had little purpose other than to inform at the most basic level and which offered no sense of progression.
I believed that the degree of student disengagement was as a result of poor course design. Jaggars and Ju, 2016, cited in Xing (2019) identified four elements in online course design that are critical to student performance including clear, consistent organisation and presentation; learning objectives and assessment; student interaction, and the availability and ease of use of technology.
Clarity and Consistency of Presentation
I felt that the course was presented in a clear and consistent manner. There were, however, some unusually presented features such as the reading lists which lacked sufficient detail such as each work’s significance, year of publication and publisher. No hyperlinks to suggested readings were provided.
Learning Objectives and Assessment
As there were no learning objectives, the construct(s) behind the selection and type of assessment tasks (if any) was unclear.
I expected the activities to have been designed to foster student-student interaction. Instead, they often focussed on primary school-like tasks on which no feedback (other than the presentation of single-word responses to questions as a selection of meaningless word clouds) was provided. I also found the ‘longer’, end-of-week tasks (below), simplistic, superficial and demotivating. The rationale for their inclusion was unclear. I did not want to engage.
Week 3
First, craft an origin story for your character. As you write your origin story, think about the news article you selected last week that discussed your social issue. If your superhero were real, how would he/she have intervened in the story to help out. Next, determine your character’s alter ego.
Week 4
Create your own supervillain who will face off with your hero. You’ll create a slide that shows your supervillain’s inspiration, characteristics of the inspiration, and your rationale for selecting the figure. Next, you’ll use your inspiration to craft a bio of your supervillain. Name your character, define his/her powers and weaknesses and write an origin story.
Importance of student interaction
Although this was stressed in the general information on the MOOC, it was not reinforced during the course. Indeed, the rationale behind the course ‘Community Page’ (below) which encourages students to interact on Facebook, Twitter and Tumbler as part of a self-paced, tutorless, learning environment was unclear. Was it perhaps a deliberate attempt to drive potential commercial traffic from superhero fan communities on interactive, algorithmic, social networking services to EdX’s website?
Blending social media with MOOC platforms is not unusual but, from my experience, is normally associated with frequent and sustained active tutor participation and mediation.
Indeed, as Liu et al. (2016) argue ‘although the additional social space of Facebook and Twitter can augment the learning experience […] to some extent, no strong evidence emerged [from their research] to indicate deeper interaction beyond sharing resources/personal feelings/examples, and connecting active users. [Importantly] the social media tools will need mediation and scaffolding from instructors or be made a central part of the course structure’ (p.24).
Did the absence of tutor mediation and scaffolding on the EdX MOOC deter participation, and did the end-of-week ‘Activity Checklist’ where participation in discussions’ was not required for end-of-course certification contribute to the community of silence? Bayne et al. (2019) point out that research on MOOCs suggests that passive behaviour by students is not uncommon and has prompted concerns about the isolation they experience.
- I watched all of the videos
- I completed the homework assignment
- I participated in one or more discussions.
- I participated with at least one group on Facebook.
As the course progressed, there was no demonstrable increase in interaction which gave me the impression that the drop-out rate must have been very high. I felt uneasy throughout, and was discouraged by what I felt were irrelevant tasks. It was clear that there was a large age-range taking the MOOC from school children taking it as part of a flipped learning activity to retired individuals presumably taking it for personal interest.
Also unusual is the lack of comments on the MOOC’s first gallery of participants’ comic strips especially when over 4,000 people have viewed them. Why have there been no further posts on the EdX Blog on such a popular MOOC for five years?
Source: https://blog.edx.org/final-comic-strips-from-smithsonianxs-the-rise-of-superheroes/
Technology: availability and ease of use
The promotion of Twitter and Facebook interaction suggests that this MOOC may not be as Massive and Open as it purports to be as it betrays a lack of awareness of the limitations such recommendations can impose on students across the globe who do not have the means (technical or financial) to engage with these platforms or whose governments restrict access to them.
The inclusion of the ‘Superhero Sketchpad’ added an unnecessary technical element to the course.
Personal Relfections on Possible Contributory Factors for the Perceived Lack of Student Community Engagement
I believe that there were many factors that contributed to the lack of student engagement online and which engendered a silent online MOOC space. These include:
1 Content was basic and focussed on the transmission of information
2 The structure of each weekly ‘issue’ was repetitive
3 Content was not ‘sticky’. The experience was akin to reading encyclopedia entries or watching excerpts from TV documentaries
4 Participants were encouraged to leave the MOOC and to engage on other websites with no clear tutor guidance
5 Task design was, arguably, weak and did not appear to be based on any clear assessment construct(s)
6 The ‘discussion board featured many ignored voices, and irrelevant contributions that failed to encourage engagement
7 The discussion board lacked any tutor mediation or scaffolding
8 It was unclear who the course was aimed at. There were no learning objectives
9 There was no sense of progress. Course content remained at same level throughout
10 The self-paced nature of the course prevented any type of community generation
11 The reading lists were not lists, but recommendations that had to be picked out of dense texts.
12 The end-of-week activity checklist did not require any degree of participation for certification
13 The wide discrepancy in ages, aims, and educational backgrounds of each of the participants
14 The course title was potentially misleading and could helpfully have added ‘1945-2020 to provide additional focus and context.
References
Bayne, S., Ewins, R., Knox, J., Lamb, J. Macleod, H., O’Shea, C., Ross, J., Sheail, P., & Sinclair, C. (2019, DRAFT). The Manifesto for Teaching Online.
HISHE (2019) How Avengers Endgame Should Have Ended. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VrjneFdZFI&feature=youtu.be. Accessed March 2, 2020.
Marvel Worldwide Inc. (2020) Marvel. Available at https://www.marvel.com/. Accessed March 2, 2020.
Min, L., McKelroy, E., Kang, J., Harron, J. & Liu, S. (2016) Examining the Use of Facebook and Twitter as an Additional Social Space in a MOOC, American Journal of Distance Education, Vol. 30, 1. pp 14-26. DOI: 10.1080/08923647.2016.1120584.
Salkovitz, R. (2019) Surprising New Data Shows Comic Readers are Leaving Superheroes Behind. Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2019/10/08/surprising-new-data-shows-comic-readers-are-leaving-superheroes-behind/#3e4a1c854d68. Accessed: March 2, 2020
Uslan, M. (2015) The Rise of the Superheroes and their Impact on Pop Culture [MOOC]. EdX. https://www.edx.org/course/the-rise-of-superheroes-and-their-impact-on-pop-cu
Watson, A. (2019) Superhero movies – Statistics & Facts. Available at: https://www.statista.com/topics/4741/superhero-movies/. Accessed: March 1, 2020.
Xing, W. (2019) Exploring the influences of MOOC design features on student performance and persistence. Distance Education, Vol. 40, 1. Pp 98-113. DOI 10.1080/01587919.2018.1553560.