Learning within MOOCs for mathematics teacher education

This paper addresses two examples from MOOCs aimed at developing mathematics teachers’ professional learning. The programme, named Math MOOC UniTO, has been developed under the guide of the three authors, in collaboration with some researcher-teachers from the University of Turin. This paper analyses the development of teachers’ learning attending the virtual environment of a MOOC, where all resources are available online and where peer interactions take place in asynchronous mode thanks to specific communication message boards. To analyse the data, two theoretical lenses are considered: Meta-Didactical Transposition and Connectivism. The first lens allows to describe teachers’ improvements at macro-level (praxeologies) and micro-level (agents); the second lens by making the uttermost consideration on the network of knowledge (learning is interpreted in the light of how nodes and connections within the network are determined dynamically). Using these theoretical lenses, we observe two different teachers’ learning processes: one which primes up because of the interventions (we call it explosion), the other less proactive (we call it linear). We discuss them presenting two emblematic different examples of data.