Massification strategy

Ross Woods, 2023

The purpose of this paper is to outline a potential delivery strategy that will enable an online program to grow. For current purposes, massification means the adaptation or creation of a delivery system to accommodate a much larger number of students.

One of the main requirements of a delivery system is that is should also be flexible enough to accommodate a variety of different kinds of units, ranging from personal development, theoretical and applied units.

Admissions

It is essential that all students meet all prerequisites for each unit in which they are enrolled. This has several implications.

  1. If some students in the cohort do not do so, it slows the whole cohort down and it is more difficult to achieve unit objectives within the alotted schedule. It also creates the risk of increased failure and dropout rates.
  2. The program leaders need to identify all those prerequisites, including any preparatory work.
  3. That work needs to have been done or refreshed quite recently. Having forgotten it is hardly different from never having done it.
  4. The institution must put considerable effort into student selection, and might even have to run catch-up courses during orientation.

A typical week’s activities

Each week’s activities for a unit must have only one clear purpose, which is written in the unit's syllabus document. All activities that week should contribute to achieving that purpose.

The activities for a typical week for a unit comprise:

  1. Online content:
    1. Students are directed to instructional videos.
    2. Students read written material.
    3. If available, students use interactive online content such as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).
  2. A Moodle quiz on the online content
  3. Videoconference tutorials; the cohort tutor holds one or two face-to-face sessions with students.
  4. The tutor might post a video message to his/her cohorts.

Explanation of activities

  1. Instructional videos
    1. The main requirement is good educational quality. Video is good to get the main points across, but not so good for detail. By using the videos to introduce the readings, students understand the readings better.
    2. Once made well, videos require little extra work until it is time to revise them.
    3. YouTube is the best host, mainly because it has good technical features, for example, it stores each video in several formats for different screen sizes.
    4. Videos are reusable on a very large scale.
    5. The presenter does not have to be the cohort tutor, so that the same video can be used with different cohorts with different tutors.
    6. Each video should not exceed six minutes and contain only one main point. (Any longer and students don’t watch the whole video.) There are more than one of these videos each week.
    7. Production quality of instructional video needs to be fairly good and generally takes more work that it appears. The main technical requirement is good sound; people stop watching if they can’t hear clearly. Other than that, it doesn't need to need to be very sophisticated. It is easy to have budget blowouts making polished video material, and large-budget production is only realistic for large numbers of students.
  2. Readings
    1. Reading materials are better than video for detailed information.
    2. They will probably always include in-house notes.
    3. For graduate students, some readings should be primary or secondary sources. Open source journal articles are ideal, although locating them can be difficult.
    4. For lower level programs, shorter “How to” articles and perhaps some personal stories might also be effective.
    5. Program designers should consider the pros and contras of html compared to pdf.
  3. Moodle quiz
    1. The Moodle quiz checks whether students have done the online activities for that week.
    2. It should count toward the unit grade; otherwise students won’t value it and will ignore it.
    3. Moodle quizzes can scale up to unlimited numbers of students when the question bank has enough suitable questions.
    4. The Moodle software can assess quizzes automatically, making them useful for unlimited numbers of students.
  4. The Zoom tutorial
    1. The tutor leads the cohort in discussion.
    2. The principle is, “One session, only one topic.”
    3. Allow an hour, but good discussions often go overtime.
  5. Tutor’s message
    1. The tutor’s message to students is a simple video, and it might be brief. It is necessary in weeks during semester when instructors have no videoconference contact with students.
    2. Its overt purpose is to respond to students.
    3. Its other purpose is show students that their teacher is a real person, not a computer program.

How big can a program go?

  1. There is no limit to the number of people who can use online materials.
  2. Some media charge fees when sizes reach certain thresholds. For example, website hosts charge more when websites use more bandwidth. Zoom costs more at increased volumes, although BigBlueButton is an option that would eliminate videoconferencing feeseven if it increased bandwidth hosting costs.
  3. A useful maximum for a cohort discussion is usually about 15 students, so the main limitation to number of students is the number of capable tutors. This will depend on:
    1. how easy it is to recruit, train, retain, and supervise them,
    2. whether they are employees or volunteers, and
    3. the workload in grading written work.

Other factors

  1. For those programs that need practicum supervision, it is a completely separate activity.
  2. A focus group should review the materials at the end of each unit.
  3. Peer-to-peer support can be helpful.
  4. Ideally, the tutor or practicum supervisor would visit the cohort’s city once each semester and meet students face-to-face. It might even be a conference if there are enough students.
  5. We should keep some tasks out of the tutor's role. Tutors should not be responsible for recruiting students, administration outside their own unit, technical support, nor billing. We should eventually automate all billing and account keeping.
  6. Chat has limited use as an educational or assessment medium.
    1. Students tend not to use it voluntarily; they tend to wait for others to speak first (“lurking”).
    2. When they discuss on chat, they send only short messages in slang and abbreviations; chat is seldom a good medium for well-formed thought.
    3. It is good for short announcements, especially WhatsApp.
  7. Handling assignments is a little different. Some units best suit small weekly assignments, while other units best suit a small number of longer papers. Either way, grading written work is a very time-consuming process.
  8. Determining specific assessment methods requires unit-by-unit decisions; they cannot be determined at the macro stage of program design.
  9. Pull vs push media
    1. “Pull” media are those where users must deliberately log in, and (often) navigate to a website. (Moodle, Zoom) Unless it is a one-click entry, students are more reluctant to log in.
    2. “Push” media are those that instigate communication if the phone is switched on, e.g. WhatsApp beeps when message comes in.