This book is the third in a sequence of books reflecting on the future of learning, and more specifically, how computers can give support to long-distance education. [1], [2]. This challenge has recently become the focal point of attention with the rise of MOOCs that finally implement the visions that advanced thinkers proposed already decades ago.

The book has three objectives.

1. First, it introduces the phenomenon of Massive Online Open Courses, known as MOOCs. They burst on the scene of long-distance computer-based learning half a decade ago with big promises of disrupting academic education. The book discusses topics like: What are MOOCs? What is their potential? What are their historical predecessors and their future prospects?

2. Second, it presents ongoing research into making MOOCs more effective and more adapted to the needs of teachers and learners. More specifically, the book focuses on a key critical issue: Given that there are tens and even hundreds of thousands of students following a particular MOOC, how can students be given the necessary feedback during the learning process and how can their competence be assessed?

3. Third, it presents the first steps towards ‘social MOOCs’. These are MOOCs that support the creation of relatively small learning communities in which interactions between learners goes beyond correcting each other's assignments. Social MOOCs try to mimic settings for humanistic learning such as a workshop, Jazz ensemble, a small choir, or a group participating in a Hackaton, in which students learn as apprentices, by solving problems, helping each other, and aided by somebody acting as tutor.

To make the discussion concrete, the book focuses on a particular domain of knowledge, namely music. Music is one of the most popular subjects (next to computing) of today's MOOCs. Many people want to learn about music, whether it is for playing an instrument, music theory, composition, song writing, or improvisation. Music requires many skills and those seriously engaged with music accept that it requires life-long learning, often taking place outside of the traditional educational system of musical academies and conservatories or private teaching.

Because of its popularity and the unique challenges that music poses to distance learning, the development of MOOCs for music has been one of the most fertile grounds for fundamental research and experimentation into MOOCs and results of experiments and the fundamental software advances that they require are already beginning to spill over into other domains of teaching through MOOCs.

What are social Moocs

Simplifying, we can say that there are two paradigms for learning and teaching: constructivist and instructional. The constructivist approach also known as ‘natural learning’ or ‘humanistic learning’ sees learners as active agents which autonomously explore their world by constructing rich models which they then try out while solving problems and making sense of the world. Learning within this paradigm ideally takes place within a (small) community of learners, for example, an atelier, a jazz ensemble, a fab lab, a hackathon. The teacher acts like a tutor that sets up scaffolded learning contexts and provides feedback to steer the discovery and exploration of models by the learner which are viewed as apprentices. Peers play a crucial role, both to motivate learners and to provide learning challenges and social feedback. Within the European tradition, the constructivist approach is associated with psychologists such as Vygotsky and Piaget and pedagogies worked out and put into practice by Steiner, Froebel, Montessori and, more recently, Malaguzzi. In the American tradition it is associated with Dewey and Bruner, liberal arts education, and the pedagogies of Papert or educational experiments such as Black Mountain College.

The instructional approach views knowledge as situation-response associations and learners as malleable acquirers of these associations through reinforcement learning. Reinforcement shapes associations in an inductive fashion through positive and negative examples and through reward and punishment administered by an external agent (possibly the environment). The instructional approach is associated in the US with psychologists such as Thorndike or Skinner and with pedagogies based on strict lesson plans with continuous assessment and clear reward and punishment. The instructional approach is also the foundation for connectionist inductive learning systems developed in AI.

The instructional approach has been shown to be very effective for the acquisition of basic skills and allows clear assessment and standardised education. It is therefore often imposed on teachers through central educational bureaucracies. But it is also known to lead to severe problems such as demotivation of both teachers and learners.

Both approaches have been used in computer-based education. For example, the programmed instruction method invented by Skinner can easily be turned into a computer-based instructional system, and some MOOCs, including many of the current MOOCs for music, follow this model rather closely. It was less obvious at first to use computers for supporting the pedagogy of open-ended constructivist learning, particularly in the context of distance education. However there have been some early significant developments showing the way. The best example is Seymour Papert's LOGO programming environment, in which learners discover mathematical concepts through programming the movements of a Turtle.

Based on this experience and the growing penetration of computers and smart phones in our daily lives, several papers in the present book argue that it is precisely through the use of computers, in particular through social media and computational means for assessment and tutoring, that a constructivist pedagogy can be put into practice on a much larger scale, leading to the promise of social MOOCs: MOOCs that try to foster a community of learners who share their work and help each other through feedback and cooperative problem solving.

Although traditional forms of classical music training, particularly the mastering of an instrument, often follow a Skinnerian instructional approach (piano teachers hitting their students on the hands is not uncommon), there is a consensus that greater enjoyment, motivation, and more powerful learning takes place within a constructivist peer setting, for example a string quartet or a small Jazz orchestra where players scaffold and motivate each other, progressively enhancing their skills. Social MOOCs try to recreate such learning conditions and thus make natural learning available to students who do not have access to the kind of peer and apprentice-style tutor interaction assumed by humanistic learning.

Structure of the book

The papers in this book all discuss steps towards social MOOCs: their foundational pedagogy, platforms to create learning communities, methods for assessment and social feedback, and concrete experiments. These papers can be read on their own, but they also strongly relate to each other and are presented in a logical progression, from background and pedagogical theory to concrete platforms and experiments. The papers are organized into five sections: I. Background, II. The role of feedback, III. Platforms for learning communities, IV. Experiences with social moocs, and V. Looking backwards and looking forward.

Part I. Background.

The first part of the book provides the basic background to later papers. It starts with a paper by LUC STEELS: The coming of (social) MOOCs. He introduces the notion of Massively Online Open Courses, sketches how MOOCs arose to deal with the ‘crisis in education’, how they rapidly spread thanks to the Internet, and what the current state of deployment is. The paper also introduces the concept of social MOOCs, why it is important to develop them, and which obstacles need to be overcome.

The second paper by JOHAN LOECKX entitled Learning music online, surveys the state of the art in on-line music learning. It provides background for the case studies reported later in the book and is intended as a guide for teachers and platform designers. Loeckx not only surveys and classifies the intense ongoing activity in online music learning but also examines critically some of the issues with available systems and argues for a better grounding of online music learning in pedagogy.

Part II. The role of feedback

Part II lays out the pedagogical foundations for social MOOCs, focusing particularly on the issue of feedback, not in terms of rewards and punishment but feedback as required to create stimulated open-ended learning environments that support constructivist learning.

The first paper by MARK D'INVERNO and ARTHUR STILLS entitled Social feedback as a creative process, sketches the historical roots of constructivist and instructional pedagogies within the Anglo-American tradition, and introduces the notion of social feedback as a key ingredient for social MOOCs.

The second paper by LUC STEELS, entitled Social Flow in Social MOOCs, pulls the concept of flow out of its traditional individualistic character to examine its potential role in the creation and sustainance of a motivated learning community within the setting of MOOCs.

Then there are two papers which give very personal accounts of learning trajectories for music. They both illustrate the importance of humanistic learning for the development of top musicians. The paper by RAY D'INVERNO, a renowned Jazz pianist, is entitled Teaching Jazz improvisation: a personal experience. It sketches his learning trajectory, recounting how the setting of a small Jazz ensemble which interacted regularly with experienced players, played a key role for him becoming a Jazz master and how he has tried to translate these insights into a teaching methodology recently used as the basis of a MOOC.

The paper by JOSEP-RAMON OLIVE, an upcoming opera singer. It is entitled Learning to be a singer and sketches his personal learning trajectory. He emphasizes again the importance of a humanistic education, where peer activity and guidance by a tutor create learning opportunities without a fixed curriculum or a rigid reinforcement framework.

Part III. Platforms for learning communities

Current MOOCs act mostly as content delivery platforms to be used by an individual learner with no direct social contact with others. The main interaction happens anonymously when learners are asked to correct some of the assignments of other students. Many MOOCs do feature some social media facilities (such as forums) and encourage physical encounters between other students in the same area. But the work on social MOOCs discussed in this book go much further, proposing and experimenting with platforms for the creation of learning communities where individuals are no longer anonymous but interact intensely with each other.

The first paper, entitled Music circle: Designing educational social machines for effective feedback, by MATTHEW YEE-KING, MARIA KRIVENSKI, HARRY BENTON, ANDREU GRIMALT-REYNES, and MARK D'INVERNO introduces a social MOOC platform for music learning that incorporates both the technologies for sharing music and mechanisms for supporting social feedback. The paper describes the participatory design methodology used to conceive this platform and reports the results of extensive evaluation studies with real users.

The second paper, entitled Giant Steps in Jazz Practice with the Social Virtual Band by MATHIEU RAMONA, FRANCOIS PACHET and STANISLAW GORLOW, describes another example of a social MOOC platform. It is geared to learn about Jazz improvisation, recreating the kind of interactions one sees in a small Jazz ensemble. The system not only integrates facilities to play along with standards, to store and share the results of these practice sessions, and to create or accept feedback with peers, but also tools for automatic machine-based feedback, for example for playing scales.

The third paper is entitled Steps towards intelligent MOOCs and contributed by KATRIEN BEULS and JOHAN LOECKX. It explores another aspect of humanistic learning, namely tutoring, using musical composition, specifically the writing of counterpoint, as a case study. The paper argues that the methods and technologies developed in intelligent tutoring systems can be integrated in MOOCs so that students get much more sophisticated feedback. The paper also reports on experiments to put flow theory at the service of scaffolding challenges for students.

The final paper of Part III is entitled Collaborative Peer Assessment using Peer-Learn by ISMEL BRITO, PATRICIA GUTIERREZ, KATINA HAZELDEN, DAVE DE JONGE, LISSETE LEMUS, NARDINE OSMAN, BRUNO ROSELL, CARLES SIERRA and CARME ROIG. It proposes a platform which has the creation and management of lesson plans devised and overseen by teachers as its core and then adds facilities for peer assessment. This platform is intended to support blended learning, in which distance education is integrated with traditional student-teacher interaction.

Part IV. Experiences with social MOOCs

This part of the book documents concrete efforts to use social MOOCs with ‘real’ users, both in the context of organized education (blended learning) and in the context of an open audience solicited through the web. The first paper entitled Using social media to revive a lost apprenticeship model in jazz education has been contributed by ED JONES, a renowned Jazz saxophonist, and HARRY BRENTON. They used the Music Circle Platform (introduced in Part III) to support a course on Jazz saxophone, studying in particular the role of tutor and peer feedback, whether a MOOC-like environment could help to revive the apprenticeship model traditionally used in Jazz education.

The second paper is entitled Improving music composition through peer feedback: experiment and preliminary results, contributed by DANIEL MARTIN, BENJAMIN FRANTZ and FRANCOIS PACHET. It reports on an experiment using the Virtual Social Band MOOC environment, raising two questions: (i) To what extent can peer feedback affect the quality of a music composition? and (ii) How does musical experience influence the quality of a feedback during the song composition process?

This part of the book ends with an intermezzo: a personal account by FIAMMETA GHEDINI on following a MOOC in the form of a comic strip entitled ‘So, I've been following a MOOOOC’. The MOOC was about song writing and offered by the Berklee College of Music (Boston).

Part V. Looking backward and looking forward.

The final part of the book puts MOOCs in a broader context. KEN KAHN, one of the early pioneers of the creative use of computers in education, discusses in his paper A half century perspective on the role of computers in learning and teaching the development of learning environments, and particularly open-ended constructivist learning environment such as LOGO Mindstorms devised by Seymour Papert.

GEORGE VAN DE PERRE, who is one of the early pioneers in distance-education and on-line learning, discusses in his paper Blended learning and MOOCs basic issues for the introduction of MOOCs within the context of traditional universities, and sketches the current movement towards blended learning that exploits the novel opportunities of MOOCs but integrated within the existing university framework.

CONCLUSIONS

The following key conclusions can be drawn from the papers in this volume: (i) MOOCs have arisen as a logical consequence of marrying long-distance education with the web and social media. They are here to stay and provide a valuable addition to the toolkit of learners and teachers alike. (ii) Most MOOCs today are based on instructional pedagogies and content delivery through the web, but there is the opportunity to build a new generation, which we call social MOOCs, that supports more powerful humanistic learning, which is much more adapted for many domains, such as Jazz improvisation. (iii) Assessment and feedback play a crucial role in all pedagogies and it is critical also in the development of social MOOCs. We need novel approaches, such as peer feedback, in which learners assess each others' achievements, automated assessment, in which algorithms take over some of the basic checks in a student's work, intelligent tutoring, which not only identifies errors but also suggests ways to repair them, etc. Several papers in this book show very concrete examples on how this can be done and report experiments testing whether these proposals work out in practice.

Due to the rapid advances of knowledge, globalization, budget cuts, and a bombardment of information, it is not easy for current generations to still find the opportunities, time, and focus for profound learning, even though this is more than ever necessary to survive in today's stressful economic climate. Technology is not a panacea for fixing the enormous challenges facing today's educators and learners, however we hope that the technologies developed here can lead to more effective and more humane learning opportunities for a larger group of students.

Acknowledgement

This book and most of the research reported here came out of the European FP7 project PRAISE (EU FP7 number 388770), funded by the European Commission under program FP7-ICT-2011-8. The seeds for many of the papers published here are the outcome of a workshop organized by Luc Steels with the assistance of Emìlia Garcia Casademont in Casteldefells (Spain) on 10-12 December 2012. I am indebted to Jorge Piz Dico (UPF, Barcelona) for proofreading most articles and helping out with Latex type setting issues, and Maria Ferrer Bonet (UPF, Barcelona) for editorial help and the handling of administrative matters. I also thank the people at IOS Press, particularly Carry Koolbergen and Paul Weij, for their efficient handling of this publication.

Luc Steels

ICREA, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC) Barcelona