Abstract:

In this paper, we apply instructional design theories and studies developed by different authors to investigate environment, interface and multimedia design in a Connectivist Massive Online Open Course (cMOOC). Our objective was to verify and understand how the most open design, distributed among various digital spaces, contributed to optimize the student interaction process, communicative actions and agency during the teaching-learning process in a virtual space.

According to Leffa and Fontana (2018), the engineering of a MOOC has the power to influence the interactions that occur in that digital space, in such way that the limited resources and rigidity of the platforms can shape the teaching-learning process. Like these authors, we understand that design architecture determines the affordances and limitations of the environment, modeling the agency of the student and the tutor, affecting the processes of teaching-learning, participation and dialogue.

In the object analyzed, the course based its pedagogical project on openness of environment and connections, so it opted for a more open environment design, spread among portal, social networks, websites and blogs. The research revealed that this project of environment design and spread content required a more participative, autonomous, engaged participant, a student willing to interact and move among the different course environments. Due to such openness, since the course was spread over multiple platforms (portal, Twitter, Youtube, Discourse Forum, blogs etc.), students had to adopt many interactive tools and multimedia resources in order to interact, faster and more intensely with other members. In this analysis, has drawn our attention the way how the features, of these many interfaces, were integrated into learning, building a proposal for interaction that stimulated exploration, collaboration and communication.

These findings of the analysis endorsed the observations of Timithy Read (2014), showing that the possibilities for agency and interaction in a MOOC course do not depend only on individuals' initiatives: they are shaped by the underlying structures, depending on the tools available on interfaces and MOOC platforms, which was applied (READ, 2014).

We concluded that, since the Connected Courses course was not tied to a specific platform, it has achieved a more interactive and horizontal communication process, creating a network of collaboration and communication between tutors and students. Therefore the findings of our analysis indicate that this outcomes was possible thanks to the affordances of the environment architecture and the more open enviroment design, which was fundamental to the participation,autonomy, agency, involvement and learning of students in cMOOC course.

Keywords:

Architecture, MOOC, Environments.