HCMUE Journal of Science 2019 · Interactive explainer
Most people who start a massive open online course never finish it, and the pedagogy behind a course matters more than the platform it runs on. This paper argues that every online course needs a written pedagogical script, set out in three layers, and walks through one real teacher-training course scripted that way.
What does one line of a script do to a learner?
On the left, the rules a real script sets for one 45-minute activity, “Connect 1”. On the right, the lesson those rules produce. Press play and take the activity yourself; each rule lights up when it starts to apply.
Which of the competences needed by a grade II upper-secondary teacher belong to the teaching-competence group?
The rules, the quiz question and its eight options are transcribed from Figure 6. The paper does not give the answer key: this demo counts as correct the five options that are set in italics in the figure, which is our reading. The timing (a few seconds, quiz at 45%) is illustrative. This activity, “Connect 1”, follows us through the whole page.
None of this behaviour comes from the software by default. Someone decided it in writing: how long the clip may be, when the question appears, what counts as “done”. The paper calls that written plan a pedagogical script, and its argument is that an course should not be built without one.
Think of it asThe script of a stage play: before anyone builds a set or hires actors, the scenes, cues and turns are already on paper.
Online courses have spread fast: flexible, cheaper, available anywhere. The paper sets aside most of their drawbacks and focuses on one: people leave, above all from . Before reading the number, make a guess.
Out of 100 people who start a MOOC, how many do you think finish?
Drag the slider, then reveal the figure the paper cites.
One square = one learner. The 90~95% non-completion rate for MOOC-type courses is cited from Yang et al. (2013) and Gütl et al. (2014); the paper does not measure it itself.
A cited study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Jacobsen, 2017) tells the same story week by week: participation starts at 100% and falls with every week of the course. The causes range from the learner’s own situation to the course’s content and presentation.
If the medium is not to blame, what is? The paper leans on e-Learning designer William Horton: at its best, quality e-Learning will be as good as learning in the best traditional classroom … at its worst, as bad as the worst one. The only difference is the design.
Horton splits “producing effective e-Learning” into four factors.
Which of Horton’s four design factors decides whether an online course works?
Tap a factor to see what it covers and how the authors annotated it.
Figure 1 of the paper, after Horton (2006), with the authors’ Vietnamese notes translated. Of the four, the paper (citing Horton 2006, 2011) singles out the pedagogical factor as the one that decides a course’s success.
Pedagogy is harder online because more things stand between learner and teacher. Citing Seok (2008), the paper notes that an e-Learning environment is far more complex than a face-to-face classroom in how learners, content, infrastructure and interface interact.
What does an online learner have to interact with?
Tap one of the four corners.
Redrawn from Figure 2 of the paper (Chen, 2001, as used by Seok, 2008). Labels are the figure’s own.
So the authors ask a narrow question: should there be a pedagogical script in the process of designing an online course? Their answer builds on , the idea that good teaching with technology joins content knowledge, pedagogy and technology instead of treating them separately.
The paper borrows the word for a play’s script, kịch bản, and calls its proposal a kịch bản sư phạm: a pedagogical script. It takes the comparison literally. A script is a plan prepared in advance for a chain of activities with many participants; a good one carries the audience “from one surprise to another”.
How does a theatre script map onto a lesson?
Switch on the classroom column.
The paper’s five principles a pedagogical script must keep, as a play’s script does:
From Section 2.2. Writing one well requires knowing what is learned and who learns it, then breaking the content into concrete activities.
Online, the paper defines the script more concretely: it is the set of (LAs) that take place in a (VLE), using specific (LOs). Two verbs matter: content is redesigned into LOs, and classroom activities are reorganised into LAs.
What goes into an online script?
Move a classroom lesson online.
Section 3.1 (after Kurilovas & Zilinskiene, 2013; Laato et al., 2019). The online activity forms are those listed for the example topic in Figure 4.
The result is and : learners move through a chain of activities that the designer has artfully “pre-chewed”, while the teacher’s role narrows to monitoring, managing and answering quickly when asked.
The core proposal: a quality online course needs three scripts, each built from the one before. The example throughout is a real course at Ho Chi Minh City University of Education: Topic 6, “Developing the professional competence of grade II upper-secondary teachers”, from an in-service training course for high-school teachers.
What does each layer of the script contain, and where is “Connect 1” in it?
Step through the three layers.
Figure 3 and Sections 3.2.1–3.2.3. Contents of each layer are the paper’s lists; the “Connect 1” excerpts are transcribed from Figures 5, 6 and 8.
The overall script starts from an existing classroom script. Its header (Figure 4) shows the conversion: the topic took 20 face-to-face periods, 12 of theory and 8 of practice, research and discussion. Online, the 12 theory periods are multiplied by a coefficient α of 1.5, chosen by the pedagogical expert.
How much online study does one classroom topic become?
Move α to see how the expert’s choice changes the online budget. The paper’s value is 1.5.
Figure 4: “12 periods × 1.5 = 18 periods, corresponding to 1080 minutes”, 14 activities. That implies 60 minutes per online period, which we use for other α values (illustrative). How the 8 practice periods are handled online is not stated.
The second half of the overall script is a detailed plan (Figure 5): each activity gets a name, its pedagogical requirements (method, technique, media), its knowledge content and its expected time in minutes. That budget is where “Connect 1” gets its 45 minutes.
How is the time budget split across the first activities?
Tap a bar to see what the plan asks of the learner.
Figure 5 shows only the first six rows of the plan (the sixth is cut off). Mandatory/optional status comes from Figure 7. The sum of the visible rows is our arithmetic.
The detailed script describes each activity of the plan “clearly and fully”. It is written for the people who will build the course: the content editing and publishing team.
Think of it asAn architect’s drawings: the overall script is the floor plan, the detailed script is the construction sheet for each room.
What does the spec sheet for “Connect 1” say?
Open each of the four parts of a detailed script.
Figure 6 and Section 3.2.2. The activity is a video lecture packaged as an interactive lesson.
Notice how the spec translates pedagogy into checkable engineering. “Make sure learners actually engage with the lecture” becomes “Next appears after 2/3 of the clip” and “a wrong answer blocks the video”. The hero at the top of this page is that spec, running.
Tap any activity. Switch to the mandatory path to see the spine of the course.
Figure 7 (navigation diagram and activity list) and Figure 8 (organisation plan; only rows 1–4 are visible in the paper, so the plan columns appear for those four).
Five circles form the spine of the course: the four “Connect” lectures and the core reading on professional ethics. The other nine squares are optional: a warm-up, games, self-reflection, a clip, further reading and consulting. The organisation plan records each choice in its type column, which also says whether an activity is graded.
The paper closes its argument through : the art and science of moving a learner from “cannot do this task” to “can”. Once ID experts design a course, the person who designs it is a pedagogical expert, not just a content writer or a technician, and the course must be both scientific and artistic.
What does an online teacher have to do, and what must the course guarantee?
Seok’s (2008) task list for online teachers, and the two qualities the paper says the script secures.
Section 3.3. Onah et al. (2014), also cited, list 8 reasons learners abandon MOOCs; the paper does not reproduce them.
That is a long list for one person, and it comes on top of the learners’ own difficulties from Part 1. The paper’s answer is that a teacher handed a course designed by others can use its pedagogical script as “orientation documents” and a “teaching plan”: the compass for running a course they did not build. In its conclusion, the paper calls the script a teaching portfolio that goes with the course.
The problems it hopes to address are the ones the e-Learning community already knows: low participation, high non-completion, and poor, unattractive learning activities. Platforms like Moodle, Sakai, Coursera, FutureLearn and edX host the courses; the script is where those problems can be dealt with at design time.
The authors say they are continuing toward a full e-Learning design process for online education in Vietnam.
Read next
Linguistic Journal 2022Teaching real Vietnamese to foreigners with a 100-million-word corpus14 min read
NICS 2020Counting the words that set Vietnamese stories apart from other texts12 min readAll publications · Get in touch about this research