Advice for Creating and Using a MOOC

In Kate Fedewa, Jeffrey T. Grabill, Kristen Heine, Julie Lindquist, and Jennifer Royston's (2014) "Thinking Like a Writer" MOOC, the authors worked to create a course that would incorporate "design features [that] would give participants an opportunity to reflect on the resources for learning and writing that would be useful to them in their educational or professional careers, help make visible the ways of thinking and practicing common among effective (and more experienced) writers, and emphasize the affordances of the revision processes for evaluating and generating writing" (p. 165). The authors worked to create "activities that supported engaged, inductive learning. The lessons [they] constructed were taught not through lectures or content-heavy videos, but through guided moments of invention and reflection, focused around the student’s own writing. [They] believed that the experience-based pedagogical model allowed for a student-led learning progression" (p. 165). The experiences of Fedewa, et al. point up the fact that developing MOOCs requires consideration of design and instructional aspects not required for face-to-face classrooms. The varied experiences of the interviewees highlight the need to consider these aspects when developing a writing MOOC.