Instructional Design
In pedagogical terms, the instructional design for the MoM was primarily didactic – content was delivered through video lectures. In total, there were 38 video lectures that covered the topics listed in the Content subsection. Lectures were comprised of a speaker in front of a camera with interspersed shots of PowerPoint slides. Presenters would add notes or diagrams on the screen to illuminate information on the slides.
Individual lectures ranged from three minutes to 25 minutes. The compilation of video lectures aggregated by week ranged from approximately 40 minutes to 120 minutes.
Participants were invited to add topics for discussion to each lecture which created threads of discussions between learners and between instructors and learners. An additional means of interaction between participants was enabled through three chat sessions scheduled in real-time between instructors and learners. The type and volume of interaction is elaborated in Section III: Results.
Evaluator Comments
Overall, the course can be described as following an xMOOC format. An xMOOC resembles a conventional learning environment – content is taught by an instructor to groups of learners. Interaction with the content is supplemented by reading/watching videos, posing questions and completing assessment activities to measure the acquisition of knowledge. In the MoM course, connections between instructor and learner or between learner and learner were facilitated through varying channels, but such activities were secondary to the objective of learning content. In this sense, pre-existing learning experiences were less important than an individual’s exposure to the subject matter. This was a different approach from the Mobiles for Development course previously offered by COL and IIT-K, which was far more reliant on collaboration among participants (Perris, 2013).
The short duration of the course mapped well to using the xMOOC format. The organization of content was compartmentalized into weekly chunks, and delivery of content occurred in a predictable method that was sequenced from general to more specific or complex information.
