Contextualizing the co-creation of artefacts within the nested social structure of a collaborative MOOC

MOOCs have traditionally been seen as providing an individual learning experience, however there is an increasing trend towards enabling social learning in MOOCs. To make online learning at scale more social and collaborative, some MOOCs have introduced cohorts. The interaction between a smaller number of learners, within a cohort, facilitates a richer exchange of experiences and ideas as compared to the effect of “drinking from the fire hose” felt in MOOCs without cohorts. Traditionally, these cohorts have been formed randomly. In this paper, we examine the MOOC “Inquiry and Technology for Teachers”, where we formed cohorts based on student demographics relevant to our course design. Furthermore, these cohorts (which we called Special Interest Groups, SIGs) contained a nested social structure of small teams that worked together on co-creating a final artifact. The different social planes (whole course, SIGs, teams, and individuals) were linked together by pedagogical scripts that orchestrated the movement of ideas and artifacts vertically and horizontally. In this contribution, we analyzed the interaction between these social planes to contextualize the co-creation of artefacts.