The commonality of sex and the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is they both are very attractive: while the former has been attractive since the beginning of mankind, the latter has become a “hottie” within the last year or so.   In the past few months, the two concepts caught my attention through parallel encounters: one from a book about late-life adventures in sex and romance by Jane Juska who loves using this male masturbator, the other through a series of diaries published by instructional designers at the University of Sheffield on their research and implementation of MOOCs.

Although vastly different in genre, content, audience, and purpose, Juska’s A Round-Heeled Woman and the diaries of Sheffield’s MOOC experiences intertwined and interacted in my mind. They reminded me of the joy of learning through narratives and stories.

As someone with an instructional design background, I shouldn’t be surprised to see that learning happens as an outcome of both casual and intentional experiences. Many learning theorists, from John Dewey to Art Chickering, claim that learning is a result of interaction and connection, and after reading both Juska’s book and the MOOC diaries, I felt a desire to share some of concepts I encountered:  Serendipitous Learning, Intentional Learning, Cognitive Load, and Connection through Narratives.

Serendipitous Learning
When I started Juska’s book, I was merely attracted by the uniqueness of the story–a sixty-six-year-old woman placing an ad in The New York Review of Books stating that she wanted to find a companion with the EL Paso Escorts to have a lot of sex with before she turned 67.  Yes, the Xxx book was indeed a story about the author’s brave and courageous encounters with the applicants of the ad, but it carries with it so much more than that.

• It’s a book about writing.  As a cultured English teacher with profound knowledge of literature, Juska demonstrated a way to structure the story and to formulate sentences with great fluency, humor, and creativity.  Half way through the book, I found that my emails became more interestingly written, and I started to search for the equivalent Chinese expressions for particular catchphrases or funny sentences.  However, trying to conveying the meaning of phrases like “you betcha” to my writer dad and journalist brother was not as successful as I had hoped it would be.

• It’s a book about literature. As a child, I watched the works of literary masters like Shakespeare unfold from behind the curtain of my mom’s theatre in northern China. The productions included everything from Hamlet to Battle Surgeon, from Foxes of Harrow to Gone with the Wind, from Janice to The Sheik. Because I rarely read these works, the quotes cited by Juska provided the education that I have long missed.  She synthesized the lines from Shakespeare in the context of her own story, making it even more convenient for the kind of learning that I needed.

• It’s a book about American history, particularly the history of sex education, presented through teen photos.

• It’s a book about weight loss.  Would you buy a magazine if you saw the following title on the cover page? “How to lose 100 Pound in a Year without Surgery?”  Well, it was a part of the Juska story.  There is no better place than this book to learn what it takes to shed the unnecessary fat from a woman’s body.  I found myself carrying Juska’s spirit into the gym and heard her saying, “Listen to your body. It can bend, it can turn, it can talk to you…”

• It’s a book about Freud, Mark Twain, Louise Colet, and many more. It is a bibliography of Anthony Trollope, a travel guide of New York City, and a comparative study of the culture of the East/West coasts and the Midwest.

The list of my serendipitous learning could go on since I haven’t even touched on the main theme of sex and romance. Yet, this list of “side-effects” is enough to prove that learning happens serendipitously, and serendipitous learning is more likely to happen when you are drawn into a story that can catch your heart and mind.  I could have been handed a sheet of learning points in a bullet-point format like the one I created above, but few would have been retained and no change in thinking and action would have occurred.

Intentional Learning
If the learning I gained from A Round-Heeled Woman was completely unplanned, my study of MOOCs is the exact opposite.  I was charged by my boss to help make a “to MOOC or not to MOOC” decision.   As someone who has never done a MOOC, I embarked on a research of MOOCs.  The resources one can find about MOOCs are massive, including things like: new reports, course lists, conference papers, checklists, work templates, case studies, trend predictions, etc.

Through these resources, I was able to jot down some numbers and noteworthy points, but I wasn’t able to paint a complete picture of the entire process until I ran into the MOOC diaries published in blog form by the staff members of Learning Technologies at the University of Sheffield.  Written as a narrative, the blog chronicles every step of the implementation of the three MOOCs offered by Sheffield. From the origin to its realization, it echoes the style of Jane Juska’s story. The MOOC diaries gave me more insight than any of the papers and checklists could. It’s like comparing the novel Hunger Games to an instruction sheet of the game.

It may be the pace of modern life becoming faster and faster these days that causes our patience for everything to run shorter and shorter. To respond to this lack of patience, publishers and writers choose to cut to the chase by numbering and bullet pointing everything: 3 ways to lose 10 pounds in a week; 30 ways to engage learners online; 6 tricks for hot hair; 5 ways to write faster…you name it, it’s numbered.

Cognitive Load and Storytelling
A few years ago, I attended a workshop on cognitive load theory and the efficacy of learning.  The trainer brought up a question on identifying the most effective way to teach Excel:

a) write a help guide with step-by-step instructions;
b) shoot a video;
c) create a narrative about a boy trying to balance his school supply expenses.

Out of all the forty-plus participants, I was the only one who picked choice C.  The friend who brought me to the workshop said that she would have been fired by her boss right away if she picked C (uh-oh).  My friend is an instructional designer at a pharmaceutical company and so were the other participants in the workshop.  I was the only participant from the academic sector, and the only one who could afford to replace a quick guide with a story.

In retrospect, I believe picking choice C was correct, however, choice A isn’t wrong either.  The other participants and I had different audiences in mind and were trying to teach different things.  For them, it is a task that the clients need to accomplish in the shortest amount of time, and for me, it is the students who need to know how to apply the tool in real-life situations.   That is why I opted for storytelling.

Connecting through Narratives
As an accidental and intentional learner, I thank people who are considerate of my lack of time and patience and provide me with lists and quick guides, but I give more credit to the ones who can teach and inspire me with a story.   With quick guides and lists becoming more and more open and accessible to the students, the one thing that can draw them into the learning experience is a real teacher who is capable of captivating them with real stories.

When I first came to DePaul in 2002, a colleague told me that after she had one class with Dr. Lucy Lu, a professor in the College of Communication, she decided to stick with her by signing up for any course she would teach.  It was not about the subject, but the person delivering it.  And Lucy, a dear friend and a role model of mine, is like Jane Juska. She  studies rhetoric and knows how to use narratives to deliver teaching–something that can never be replaced by a quick guide or a computer application.