davidtjones.wordpress.com/…-missing-perspectives-on-moocs
This will be my third MOOC. I loved MobiMooc and completed the project because it was of interest to me. I have not completed the Udacity course Lean Launch Pad, even though the topic is very interesting to me. So, I’m interested in learning the MIT approach to the MOOC…
Why did you not complete the Udacity course?
My guess is that Kris has “oversubscribed” a bit. Which is something I’m sure happens with “free courses” a bit more than “pay courses”, although lots of students drop out after having paid a lot of tuition for a college course.
I just signed up for the Media Labs thing, but will I actually show up for class? Hey, they say it will come around again… bad student, I guess.
We like to bounce around, doing a little here, a little there, and something that wants us to really apply ourselves over an extensive period of time…becomes something we don’t always find our way back to. So, maybe courses should be shorter? Or extrinsic motivation sweeter?
Two completely different points:
1) Relative to Kris’ post, I was/am pretty interested to see what triggers “completion” or not. I too try a lot of things, most of which I discontinue early on. In this case, I thought the course would have a lot to offer PSA and, at least for me, it did not take many hours to run through (not study) the material.
2) On a PSA “form” sense, I am quickly finding that there is a real difference in how one might best present a “blog” and a “discussion”. For the latter, a threaded conversation mode seems much better that having the “comments” appear only if you click to view them. Just one persons input.
Hmmm, another thing to think about. There is forum software connected to WP that could be “installed”. Going by how we used Diigo PSA Resources, we would curate a link with a description, and then there would be a few followup comments. But not a lengthy series of discussion posts. Not to say I wouldn’t have interest in a threaded discussion as well.
There’s a category here for “Go Ahead Caller” which is for longer posts of a more discussion or rant type nature. A post with that category attached will show up in the Go Ahead Caller blog in the menu items.
Maybe we’ll also try hosting a “forum”…. maybe not too far down the road. We have been peddling as fast I can… Good suggestion.
I’m noticing if I hit the “Reply” button, comments are threaded, fwiw.
At this time, my interest in a MOOC is more in how the technology is used to improve learning. So, I intentionally set my level of participation to test “something” such as: How do experts interact with the users (videos,webinars, discussions, asynchronous vs synchronous)? How do learners interact with each other (discussions in a guided setting or discussions generating from the learners, learners or experts modeling solutions to a meaningful project, discussions within a set LMS or discussions in social media outside an LMS )?
I like your questions, as soon we are going to be working on our SLC core concept keynote, and will want to at least ask the right questions, and hopefully have some answers too.
Yes Kris, trying out is “learning” too. Always good to see how others are/have done something to get additional perspective, and find good ideas. One doesn’t have to be original, one just has to know a good idea when one sees it. And to see it, one needs to “look” around a lot.
It was useful to look at how Udacity was doing SLC…with their Karma points etc. Many of our PSA questions for Core Concepts will be answered by looking around. Although we do a pretty good job of brainstorming our way to some solutions on our own at times.