On Connectivism and Scale
Martin Weller makes some excellent points in his recent post on connectivism and scale, and they merit a short response.
Weller is writing in response to a specific statement I made in a recent post on another topic, which I'll quote here:
One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to create interaction and facilitation for each other. This is because there is no system in the world where a 1:30 instructor:student ratio will scale to provide open and equitable access. In my view, this model worked very well. Weller's criticism follows two general lines - I may overstate them a bit for clarity, but the reasoning is fairly clear:
First, it has not been shown that a connectivism model of an online course will scale to massive numbers of students (like, say, 30,000 or more), and certainly not for inexperienced and lower-level students.Second, it has not been shown that a connectivist approach is the only way a course can scale to such …
Weller is writing in response to a specific statement I made in a recent post on another topic, which I'll quote here:
One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to create interaction and facilitation for each other. This is because there is no system in the world where a 1:30 instructor:student ratio will scale to provide open and equitable access. In my view, this model worked very well. Weller's criticism follows two general lines - I may overstate them a bit for clarity, but the reasoning is fairly clear:
First, it has not been shown that a connectivism model of an online course will scale to massive numbers of students (like, say, 30,000 or more), and certainly not for inexperienced and lower-level students.Second, it has not been shown that a connectivist approach is the only way a course can scale to such …
