Reading “Distributed leadership and peer review: a MOOC exemplar” by Bosanquet & Harvey (2005), and checking out their MOOC

I have always liked online learning, and ever since my first MOOC experiences (with the “Evidence-based undergraduate STEM teaching” MOOC on Coursera back in 2015, which set me on the path of letting people take pictures of disciplinary content out in the real world and sharing it on Twitter, which then became #WaveWatching, and now has become the Active Lunch Break which I still want to expand into a “Carving space to learn for sustainable futures” exercise) I have been interested in how to make good MOOCs. And I think it is becoming increasingly important to provide really good online resources so people do not feel that they have to travel for excellent professional development opportunities.

One feature that I really liked about that very first MOOC was that they used “local hubs” to facilitate discussions. People could volunteer to organise local discussion groups (of course I did!), and then they would receive discussion points whenever a new module was dripped, so they could use that to structure their meetings instead of having to come up with structures, discussion prompts, etc. themselves. I remember that I would always go through all the materials on the MOOC but then recommend a selection that participants in my group should definitely look at and that we would focus our discussions on. That worked super well, and I loved the combination of lots of inspiration and new ideas coming in from the outside, while at the same time having discussions and strengthening the network with my close colleagues, being able to directly apply all the new stuff to our own context! In the case of that MOOC, new modules were opened up every week (or possibly every 14 days, can’t remember), and then we would have our discussions a couple of days after. Since the whole MOOC was dripped and done more or less in parallel by all participants, this helped raise the urgency of having the meetings (in contrast to a completely self-paced MOOC where you could still have local discussion hubs, but then it would be easy to run out of steam since there is no external “pressure” to keep up the pace. On the other hand, we have just scheduled meetings for a slow reading of my new favourite book, so we’ll see how that works!). But anything is better than just a “discuss here so you can get a check mark and receive your certificate” discussion thread without actual responses from anyone…

Anyway. I just read Bosanquet & Harvey (2025) on “Distributed leadership and peer review: a MOOC exemplar.” There, they discuss how they are working with a review of a MOOC using the “distributed leadership’s 6E framework”:

1. Engage: They managed to find more than 40 people; original authors, emerging leaders in teaching and learning, and others, to act as authors and reviewers
2. Enable: In order to work together constructively, they put effort into building strong relationships that were willing to give and receive feedback. Feedback was structured through checklists in addition to more detailled, open texts. I like the review criteria: “suitable for participants new to teaching in higher education; suitable for an international audience; scholarly and evidence-based; engaging and motivating for self-paced learners; and including a variety of text, video, and activities”
3. Enact: The work was structured very well though both a schedule and checklists, and scaffolded with a test module and a quality enhancement process
4. Encourage: Authors’ contributions are very visibly acknowledged, both in the MOOC with author pages, as well as on social media and other communications
5. Evaluate: There is an ongoing evaluation of both the development process and the user experiences. They see that the MOOC is used to provide evidence for teaching development, for example in promotion applications.
6. Emergent: It will never be finished, but hopefully continuously improved and updated

Of course, after reading this, I had to check out the MOOC. A nice overview is given here in a blog post on The Slow Academic, and then you can also enrol directly in the Canvas course (which, of course, I did). What I really like here is that they have four different pathways that they recommend (while also encouraging “just in time and just for me” exploration): new to teaching, enhancing student learning, enhancing your teaching, and leading learning and teaching. They overlap a little (and of course there is no reason that they shouldn’t!), and it seems like that is in a really intentional way.

I did not have the chance (yet!) to look through all the modules, but what I have seen so far I have really liked! For example, in module 6 on “learning theories”, there is a template for a concept map on “my theoretically informed beliefs about learning and teaching” which brings together theories, concepts, contexts, active learning techniques on identity and empowerment, situated connectedness, development of self, conditioning learning behaviours, culturally constructed meaning, and reflection on experience. Now I really want to work with that! And in module 8 on “reflection” (and reflection is the link to how I came to read this article and find the MOOC in the first place…), they include reflective methods (like a minute paper, or 5 main points) in the flow of the module. They also have a long list of reflective practices. One that I picked is called “give your brain a break”, which is really about just that: getting up, maybe stretching, maybe looking out of the window, and then coming back and thinking about how you feel. Gonna do that now, brb! …And then I came back so refreshed that I looked at more reflection activities than the two I was supposed to… I also really like the idea to reflect on our teaching explicitly putting on four different lenses: Our own, autobiographical reflection, our students’ perspective, our colleagues’ perspective, and a theoretical reflection.

And now I got sucked into the “Universal Design” module 10, which I really like a lot. But that’s for another post…

But in a nutshell: I really like the approach to co-creating a MOOC, and the result is very convincing! And I think this is the way to go: Using larger networks of experts, across countries or continents or the whole world, all contributing their expertise, creating a product that is bigger than the sum of individual contributions. I would now be really interested in figuring out how to connect it back to local communties and networks, maybe similar to what I describe in the beginning of this post, but maybe even connecting it to structured courses that we are giving ourselves. If such a great online resource exists, why should I create Canvas pages for my own course instead of using these? I could always pick and choose and embed them into my own course structure, and complement them with whatever else I think is important. I do believe that it is important to strongly connect to the local context; different legal situations, different cultural backgrounds, different place-based activities. But why not combine the two?

P.S.: Yes, commenting on my blogposts is usually a good way to make me check out other recent publications… :-D

P.P.S.: No sun today, this picture is from yesterday’s coooold dip… Where it was surprisingly lovely and warm when you managed to find a spot sheltered from the wind and in the sun!

Bosanquet, A., & Harvey, M. (2025). Distributed leadership and peer review: a MOOC exemplar. International Journal for Academic Development, 1-5.