Are MOOCs impacting on-campus students? Jul. 2014 | Page 16

Coursera platform which is inherently designed for xMOOC, again mentioning that
collaborative elements from the cMOOC format are more in keeping with the
educational approach that they would like to develop than the Cousera xMOOC
format (Knox, Bayne, Macleod, Ross, & Sinclair, 2012).
Daphne Koller claims that the pedagogy of the Coursera platform is formed around
the idea from Bloom of the ‘2 Sigma Problem’ (Bloom, 1996). Bloom studied three
groups of students with different levels of tuition. One group had a lecture in the
traditional way with no personal contact, one group had smaller seminar type
sessions with more focused interactive sessions and the final group had one to one
tutorials. Not surprisingly, the one to one group’s final grades were 2 sigma’s (or
standard deviations) higher than the grades of the control group (the regular lecture
group). The Coursera platform and therefore the MOOCs, have access to utilize the
concept of the mastery group (the middle group) whereby the sessions are more like
a seminar, with an element of one to one tutorials. Although this is possible, it still
depends very much on which courses are running and who has designed them.
The platform may allow for a very much more interactive experience, but unless the
course has been aligned pedagogically in this way, it will make no difference to the
learners. What is useful, educationally, is that Koller has raised this as an option.
She has brought to the non- educationalists, ideas of how to teach from a distance
using technology, in a way that would benefit on campus students completely their
studies within blended learning classes.
The pedagogy for MOOCs is constantly evolving, new research becomes available
highlighting models of delivery that worked and those that don’t or are too restrictive.
This information is not just useful for developing MOOCs but it is also useful for the
development of on campus classes too.

2.4 BLENDED LEARNI