By Haidee Thanda, EDC Instructional Designer
For the past few months, I have been working on a team to develop Carleton’s first instances of MOOCs (also known as Massive Open Online Courses). As a student who has taken courses in a classroom setting on top of working a 25-hour a week part-time job, I have been motivated about the opportunities and flexibility these courses can provide. The potential it presents is all very exciting. However, success rates aren’t as great as you might think. For all of the hype about MOOCs, the dropout rate is about 90 per cent. Only a fraction of students successfully complete a course.
Bayne and Ross’ report for the Higher Education Academy on The Pedagogy of the Massive Open Online Course: the UK view (2013), provides valuable insights into the tensions, ambiguities and opportunities afforded by MOOCs. Truly, there are as many reasons for the low student completion rate as there are individual motivations for taking an online course. As an instructional designer, this made me curious and I decided I wanted to explore this problem.
Accordingly, with the advent of Carleton’s open online courses, the alarming statistics on dropout rates and some really stimulating discussions with faculty and colleagues, I decided to pitch a solution in order to help students successfully complete online courses at EDU Startup Weekend Montreal. The aim of Start-up Weekend was to come together and share tech solutions for education, form teams and develop a minimal viable product (MVP) (for more information on this event read: EDU Start-up Weekend: Third Place and Three Takeaways).
The idea of a minimum viable product, also known as quick prototyping, was popularized by Eric Ries, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The concept is akin to writing an outline and getting it reviewed by your audience before you do hours of research and build your argument. When you get early feedback, you are able to develop a more effective paper.
We named our prototype the “MOOC survivor tool.” While developing a prototype, I learned that there were a few things this approach could offer to the field of online learning.
When applied to online learning, the idea is simple: create a prototype in increments and test it with customers to validate with real life users. This allows you to learn about what your users need and want while investing little time in going down unnecessary paths. It is essentially nullifying or accepting your hypothesis or assumptions. The process tells you from an early stage if your idea or hypothesis is useful and worth building. The formula is simple: build, test, learn and repeat.
So what can creating a minimal viable product offer the world of learning and development?
As a designer, our ultimate aim is to build a product that meets the desired learning outcomes in order to develop knowledge and skills. Without gathering feedback, it’s difficult to know if we are hitting the mark. So we need to test early and frequently. When we create an MVP, it’s easier not to get attached to a basic design so we can make faster iterations. In most cases, developing an MVP can accelerate learning and save valuable resources.