Here are my recommendations from FutureLearn, at least in part likely informed by some of the MOOCs I signed up to while deciding upon my micro-ethnography. These MOOCs include:
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- People Studying People: Research Ethics in Society (University of Leicester)
- Next Generation Biosecurity: Responding to 21st Century Biorisks (University of Bath / Biosecure)
- Defensive Programming and Debugging (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE))
- Making Music with Others (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance)
Signing up for these MOOCs appears to have affected these recommendations fairly significantly, given there are recommended courses in the areas of research, security and programming. However, there appear to be few (if any) courses directly touching on the areas of anthropology and music (which my enrolled courses cover); this may be due to lack of currently available courses although there may be other reasons.
How have other people been involved in shaping results?
It is not clear (at least from this page) how they make the recommendation decisions, but there may well be algorithmic ranking based on sponsorship, course popularity or “staff picks”. Therefore, it’s possible that other students’ enrolments or FutureLearn staff decisions may alter my recommendations.
I don’t think I would normally make use of the explicitly labelled recommendations, however I often make use of the search function which may include similar algorithmic ordering and ranking. The choices here seem fairly limiting, almost persuading me that – in order to be an “expert” – I should study them. There seems to be the assumption that I would choose to study a similar course to one I have studied before, even though in reality I would probably want to look at something completely different.
What might be the implications?
My concern, looking at both the general catalogue of courses and the recommendations (albeit very briefly), is that certain subjects appear privileged over others (there are a great deal of courses on computer programming, for instance). As mentioned above, this may be down to many other factors (such as course availability), however it would be interesting to see how course enrolment numbers impact upon the ranking. I personally would find this a little disconcerting – I wouldn’t want a course that simply has high enrolment numbers to be privileged in my recommendations. As elsewhere in education, just because a course may have lower numbers or generate less money, it doesn’t mean it is any less important.