Not 1, not 2 but 3 SPOCs have run since the last blog entry of Elevate Health. In this blog, we’ll browse through the course development and most importantly: tell you a bit more about the first evaluation results of the pilot phase.

Let’s start off with a short recap. Every H2020 INTEGRITY SPOC (Small Private Online Course) has the same structure, containing several learning units, and in each learning unit a specific topic is tackled. The students learn more about a specific topic by means of articles and/or videos, whilst building a personal portfolio with individual assignments, sharing their work with others and further expanding their assignments. They delve deeper into the materials and get a deeper understanding of the course content.

One of the core elements in the SPOCs is working together. Early in the twentieth century, Lev Vygotsky’s ideas laid the foundation of the sociological theory social constructivism, stating that ‘Social interaction is the origin and engine of learning.’ At Elevate, we fully support and incorporate social constructivism in our practices. With this, and obviously decades of research and innovation afterwards, the INTEGRITY SPOCs were developed with social constructivism at its foundation.

However, the course development process never ends at the launch of the course. Course development is a cyclic process, the evaluation will always spark new insights to evolve the course to a next and, hopefully, better edition. This cyclic process originates from the ADDIE model, well known in the world of instructional design. ADDIE is an acronym for the different stages during a product development process. First you have the Analysis phase and Design phase, then the Development phase, and finally Implementation phase and Evaluation phase. The focus of this model, as with the course development, is on evaluation and this brings us to an important part of the blog: the evaluation results of the pilot phase.

The pilot phase for the first three SPOCs is completed and participants have filled in a questionnaire about their experiences.

The results of the questionnaire of SPOC 1 (‘Responsible Research through supervision, mentoring and working together’) were overwhelmingly positive. All the reviewers were pleased with the online interactions between teachers and students, saying that this part should definitely be kept in next editions. They would, although, like to have more practical assignments and cases. As one of them stated:

‘I really liked the role-play assignment, I think more of these assignments could be added’.

From the results of the second SPOC (‘Data in responsible conduct of research’), it was noticeable that some participants complained about not having enough time.

‘2½ hrs weekly is a very underestimated duration for this course’, someone said.

This could be improved during the next runs of this SPOC, optimizing time allocation.

Although the participants of the first SPOC were pleased with working together with teachers and students, participants from the third SPOC (‘Integrity in academic publication: authorship and peer review’) were a bit more critical about working together. They suggested having less group assignments, due to the dependency on others, and difficulty in arranging these assignments. Working together is not always easy.

The pilot phase of the three SPOCs is now complete. Together with the Utrecht University, these editions have been evaluated and, according to the ADDIE model, several assignments were revised for the next official run. Also, to research and improve the group work, nudges are included. The nudges are tools to facilitate automatic role assignments in group work, thus facilitating working together even better. Almost every run has both a regular edition and a nudge edition. Whilst online group work is often found challenging, these nudges are thought to optimize social online learning. But is that truly the case? Our colleagues at Université de Genève (Switzerland) are researching the effect of the nudges. Hopefully we can dive into that in our next blog!

Feature image author – @freepik