40 | SPOCS | HIGHER EDUCATION
“THE SPOC, WITH ITS BLEND OF MOOC TECHNOLOGY AND TRADITIONAL TEACHING METHODS, COULD BE VERY WELL BE THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS”
With UK tuition fees creeping higher at the same time that technology is becoming slicker, it's no surprise to see online courses fl ourishing in the higher education section. First there was the MOOC, the massive open online course, the fi rst instance of which was off ered in 2008 and really took off in 2012. With their unlimited enrolment and access, these were hailed as revolutionary ways of opening up education for more people, and providers such as edX, Coursera and Udacity joined forces with universities to off er a wide range of courses, some of which were taught in parallel with paid-for university courses. Their popularity grew quickly – the University of Southampton reached its 100,000 MOOC student milestone in October 2014 – but the cracks soon started to appear. Ironically, for something that was supposed to make learning more open, often just too many people wanted to take part, and questions were raised over the assessment of students, and whether a MOOC qualifi cation would be formally recognised in an academic context. The inability to make MOOCs profi table was also an issue. Then in 2013, Professor Armando Fox
BELOW: (l-r) Frank Steiner, David Beck, Ben Audsley, Armando Fox
of UC Berkeley coined the term SPOC – the small private online course, to refer to a MOOC that was used in a business- to-business context. He explains how it came about: “When my colleague David Pat erson and I fi rst taught our MOOC, 'Engineering Software as a Service', we asked the MOOC provider to create a separate copy of the MOOC for exclusive use of our on-campus students, because there were course elements that we needed to add or change for them compared with the MOOC students. The ease of doing this made us realise that MOOC technology could be a great way to transfer curricular materials, so
we coined the term SPOC to describe this use case, and reached out to computer science colleagues at other universities to see if they'd be interested in using our materials this way.” Thus a new style of learning was
born. Taking the best of the MOOC – the fl exibility of participation, the online accessibility – but limiting numbers, SPOCs are now being hailed as the way that universities can open up their access but in a controlled manner. The idea of a SPOC is to disseminate the lectures and course materials online and via video resources, to be done as homework. In the face-to-face time, lecturers can use their time to answer questions, assess their knowledge and go over any points that have been missed, and work on other assignments. The content can therefore be adapted to the curriculum, students’ needs and the preferences of the lecturer. And while MOOC enrolments can be up in the thousands, SPOCs are limited to whatever the course provider feels is a sustainable number. “An early objection to MOOCs with
fl ipped classrooms was that they would ‘homogenise’ teaching by turning classroom instructors into highly-paid teaching assistants all parroting the same course. Our experience is that that isn't what happens,” says Armando. “Creating good foundational materials
is a lot of work and not necessarily every instructor's strength, so SPOCs allow instructors to concentrate on what they do best and enjoy most – working with individual students, inventing new in-class activities, and so on – rather than having to also create all the basic materials as they go. In that sense, SPOCs are like supercharged textbooks: if someone uses my textbook in their course, that doesn't make it ‘my course’, but it does provide a good foundation
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