Assignment 1!

Hello and apologies that there has been a little break in blog posts recently. I was off on “holiday” (which proved to be more exhausting than normal work!) and then when I came back I was straight into Assignment 1, which took up much of my time over the past week. For that, I decided to press ahead with my (slightly underdeveloped) idea of taking the MOOC forward for the dissertation proposal. So how did I get back up to speed with the literature and shaping the proposal draft for submission? Well, taking some of the skills that I have picked up over the years on writing introductions for research papers, I knew that the structure of assignment 1 would consist roughly of:

• Background context of the chosen research topic;
• What we currently know about the topic vs what we don’t know;
• Draw together a convincing argument (i.e., research questions) for what are the most important things that we should know, and how finding this out will benefit the research domain and practitioners.

With this basic structure in mind, I spent a few days collecting as much literature on MOOC as I could (whilst logging the bibliographic data for each in Refworks for future referencing). I then went through each and observed what they said about MOOCs in terms of what they are, why they are important, and what research should be conducted. I thus started to flesh out these three core elements of the structure. Am I happy with the result? Well I found it very therapeutic as the reading and writing has definitely helped me to gather together my thoughts and formulate (what I believe is) a reasoned proposal for studying MOOCs for the dissertation.

So what are my thoughts on the focus of motivational aspects of MOOCs? Before I read through the 70+ articles that I found on this (initial) literature search, I would have argued that this was actually too obvious a topic! However, there were numerous articles that proposed this in their closing statements as what online learning genuinely needs to progress and so, reservations aside, this shall form the core of my literature review that I will conduct in Unit 3. Speaking of which, the next blog post will consider the learning materials provided (tutorial videos, example literature reviews, etc.) and I will also explore some more article methodologies, before diving into my own review of the (substantial) body of literature on motivational aspects of the MOOC.