Effective Pedagogy at Scale: Social Learning and Citizen Inquiry

For the past four years The Open University has published annual Innovating Pedagogy reports. Our aim has been to shift the focus of horizon scanning for education away from novel technologies towards new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. In the most recent report, from over thirty pedagogies, ranging from bricolage to stealth assessment, we have identified six overarching themes, of scale, connectivity, reflection, extension, embodiment, and personalisation [8]. Delivering education at massive scale has been the headline innovation of the past four years. This success begs the question of "which pedagogies can work successfully at scale?". Sports coaching is an example of teaching that does not scale. It involves monitoring and diagnosis of an individual's performance, based on holistic observation of body movements, followed by personal tutoring and posture adjustments. Any of these elements might be deployed at scale (for example, diagnostic learning analytics [10], or AI-based personal tutoring [4] but in combination they require the physical presence of a human coach. The major xMOOC platforms were initially based on an instructivist pedagogy of a repeated cycle of inform and test. This has the benefit of being relatively impervious to scale. A lecture can be presented to 200 students in a theatre or to 20,000 viewers online with similar impact. Delivered on personal computers, instructivist pedagogy offers elements of personalisation, by providing adaptive feedback on quiz answers and alternative routes through the content.