Abstract:

Informal learning builds on the tradition and increasingly visible efforts by scholars to engage with the public and by universities to offer open educational resources to extend impact and fulfill their missions. As emerging goals and modalities challenge the bounds of pedagogical practice, educators and instructional designers may benefit from frameworks for designing novel types of learning experiences. For example, conceptual frameworks have been created to empower educators and organizations to design Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

This paper presents the design framework and evaluation for online learning events called Teach-Outs. Teach-Outs are free and open online learning experiences designed to connect diverse experts with engaged citizens around timely social issues. The framework was inspired by pedagogical foundations described in this paper, including community of inquiry, conversation theory, and social learning. Its creation was motivated by the desire to further public engagement by universities, reduce barriers between scholars or experts and engaged citizens, and activate understanding around timely social issues.

The Teach-Out design framework includes eight key design attributes, which define Teach-Outs as: open, brief, engaged, inclusive, diverse, connected, bridging, and actionable. We elaborate on the meaning of the attributes and guiding design methods through several case examples of previously launched Teach-Outs. Furthermore, we describe the training and materials used to operationalize the framework during design of Teach-Outs, including two training seminars with 15 institutions of higher education. We will share practical insights on the affordances of the design framework and potential challenges faced during Teach-Out creation based on these experiences and outcome attributes.

Attributes were evaluated to assess the degree to which the design framework is achieved in the 31 Teach-Outs published between March 2017 and February 2020. Outcomes informing the success of the framework will be shared including types of experts included, participant enrollment statistics, and activity in discussions. For example, we may consider Teach-Outs as successfully connecting participants across our first 23 Teach-Outs, since, on average, 20% of enrollees in a Teach-Out will post in the discussion forum (approximately twice as many as in a typical MOOC), and they post twice as much (approximately 3.25 posts per person).

We conclude by encouraging other educational and community organizations to utilize the Teach-Out framework, propose novel applications, and discuss future research opportunities.

Keywords:

Online Learning, Public Engagement, Pedagogy, Informal Learning, MOOC, Design.