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62 | SPOCS | EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY


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for them to build on. But unlike textbooks, which are passive, SPOCs use MOOC technology to include lots of interactive activities for the students.” The US has led the way with SPOCs in


universities such as Harvard, UC Berkeley, San Jose State University and MIT. In the UK, universities experimenting with the SPOC include Warwick, Reading, the Royal Veterinary College and Bloomsbury College. David Beck, an Academic Technologist at the University of Warwick, co-convened a SPOC course last year on digital tools for researchers, aimed primarily at doctoral students, and he found that the three main advantages were efficiency, availability and fit. “A SPOC can be created by lecturers to fill a specific gap, and respond to students' needs. It makes a specific guided learning environment available, and unlike freely available online resources, the structure of a SPOC ensures that students access and learn material in the correct order,” explains David. “As for fit, this is best achieved through a taught face-to-face course with personal interaction between tutor and student. A MOOC would be most efficient, and if well-designed would give a similarly available guided learning environment. A SPOC, as might be expected, sits somewhere in the middle.” The course received overwhelmingly


positive feedback, with students citing their approval of its flexible nature, which appealed to part-time and distance learners, as did being able to work through the modules at their own pace. There were some disadvantages, however. “A few of the students remarked that they would have liked more engagement with their peers. While MOOCs are able, to some extent, to substitute weight-of- numbers for closer community, with SPOCs students are engaging with the material at different times, to different depths, and coming from different backgrounds.” If a course is taught online, students often engage with it differently to the way they would for a traditional taught lecture course, so it’s important that people realise that a SPOC is more than just a web page, and properly take part in it, says David. “Overcoming this misconception and ensuring students value the way in which a SPOC guides their learning is an important step that must be made early on in a course.” As well as using SPOCs to teach


students, they are also emerging as an efficient way of offering staff training. Ben Audsley, VLE Manager at the Royal Veterinary College, organised a


of our staff who are on two separate campuses,” says Ben. “Because the SPOC encouraged the


participants to dip in and out of sections that are relevant to them, it meant that staff didn’t have to sign up to complete the whole course, which lifted some of the pressure often felt by participants of online courses. The other main advantage of a SPOC is that it can offer a more personal experience than a MOOC.” And as one of the aims was to improve the design and content of courses on RVC Learn, the course’s success means that there has also been a positive effect on the way students learn. One issue that had been raised with


the advent of MOOCs, and will continue with SPOCs, is whether the traditional campus set-up is in danger of becoming redundant, if students find that they can get everything they need online. But the MOOC has already been shown to be unsustainable in a variety of ways, and so the SPOC, with its blend of MOOC technology and traditional teaching methods, could be very well be the best of both worlds. Frank Steiner from the University of


London Computer Centre, a leading IT services which provides Virtual Learning Environments for over 120 UK universities, doesn’t see SPOCs as a threat to traditional university learning. “They have their place, but I think they’re the Emperor’s new clothes – all university courses are small and private. They’re useful for students to check the content of a course and make sure it’s the right one for them, particularly now with tuition fees being so high, and for CPD and staff training, but they’re no substitute for in-person teaching. I’m now seeing some of our customers moving away from the hype and going back to the basic roots of pedagogy.” Giving the last word to the creator


SPOC for staff to help them gain beter understanding of RVC Learn, the College’s Moodle platform. Previous training events had been badly atended, so this SPOC, which also had optional face-to-face training sessions for each module, meant that 49 out of the 59 people who signed up ended up accessing the course. “The idea of a completely online course meant that participants could learn anywhere, at any time and at their own pace. This suited the needs


of the term, Armando Fox feels that, far from making lecturers redundant, offering SPOCs actually ensures beter use of their time and more creative ways of teaching course content. “Both MOOCs and SPOCs offer the opportunity to use class time in a more imaginative format than just delivering a lecture. That sounds like a great idea and students can really benefit from it, but it is a lot more work for the instructor compared with delivering lectures. In that sense, I think MOOCs and SPOCs have really raised the bar for 'on-campus' teaching and forced instructors to think about what the best use of their time is.” UB


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