Teacher development in Massive Open Online Courses - Evaluating reflective practice in a sustainability MOOC

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) appear particularly relevant in education for sustainability. Teachers need to critically reflect on their teaching to develop as teachers and improve student learning, but the MOOC related literature has paid little attention to teacher development. In this paper, we apply and evaluate a framework for teacher development – Brookfield's critically reflective practitioner – in a MOOC context. We present a case study of two teachers who developed and delivered the Sustainability in Everyday Life MOOC. We analyse how they used Brookfield’s four reflective lenses: the autobiographical lens, the student lens, the peer lens, and the scholarship lens. While all four lenses contributed to the reflection process, they were insufficient in a MOOC context. Additional and important reflective lenses include the perspectives of the organisational leadership, the public and media as well as learning analytics. We discuss the implications of those additional lenses in the MOOC context, but they could be relevant for modern higher education in general.