7C's: And the problem of schooling and personalized learning paths

The 7Cs model by Conole offers a method for discussing educational design. It has gone through several changes ending in a version from 2013 consisting of seven stages gathered in four phases: Vision (conceptualize), Activities (capture, communicate, collaborate, consider), Synthesis (combine), Implementation (consolidate) (eg. Conole, 2014: 74). The latest model seems quite static and we find that it lacks the ‘problem of schooling’. When students enter into a learning environment they often accept the discourse of ‘School’ understood as a semiotic domain “...of specialized representations, modalities, knowledge, and practices” (Gee 2008: 137). In a semiotic domain people are expected to act, talk and position themselves according to the expectations of the domain, framed by Gee as ‘doing being’ someone. Through an analysis of concepts and ideas as well as written communication between teachers and students from completed MOOC courses in our institution we found, that this schooling frame made important changes to the design. When planning the MOOCs, one of the main important concepts was that each student should be provided with their own learning path, ideally to be unique for each of them, because the students accepted into the MOOC seem to have a variety of backgrounds (also see e.g. Gynther 2016). This makes the idea of a personalised learning path necessary. But since our MOOCs were organized through a combination of f2f-teaching and MOOC studying, the students acted like in a school domain which seems to be in opposition to the expected personalised learning pathways, and instead they seem to follow the same, teacher instructed learning path. To bring the 7C’s model alive we suggest that it is taken into consideration that this school discourse plays an important role when planning MOOCs, and we therefore present some changes to the model.