The Great Big MOOC Book!

This past week I was talking to local folks at the University about eduMOOC, and MOOCs in general seeing as I am thinking of implementing a MOOC for language learning for my PhD thesis. OK, I am not in a PhD program yet, but it helps to start thinking about these things in advance so you're not stuck in Dissertation Purgatory.

In any case, people don't know what a MOOC is; how is a MOOC different from an online course? How is it different from OpenCourseWare? How is it different from the Open Learning Initiative? I do my best to describe MOOCs, but it seems to me that this is a good opportunity for us, active MOOC participants and MOOC facilitators, to put together a Book on MOOCs. I know that there is the MOOC model for Digital Practice but it doesn't really address many areas of MOOCs that people traditionally think of when they think of classes, such as learner engament, learner assessment, learner profiles from previous MOOCs (that might give you an idea of who might be coming to your MOOC) and so on.

I was thinking of enlisting the help of many MOOC regulars and MOOC originators like George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier, Ignatia deWaard and other to create The Great Big MOOC Book.  Yes, perhaps the title conjures up images of children's books, but it's catchy. And heck, it's a collaborative book, so if other collaborators want, the name can change to something else.

The idea behind this book came from reading the Theory and Practice of Online Learning by Athabasca Press. The book is written by many authors and published by a university press. You can get the book for Free as an eBook, or if you really want a paper copy you can buy it on Amazon. I was thinking that the MOOC Book can be the same - freely available as an eBook, but if people really wanted a paper version they could get it on Amazon (or other booksellers).

Click here for the organizing document.  I've added in a lot of chapters that I thought would be good to have, and there are many blank chapters for ideas that people can add their own. Someone suggested that we do a call for chapters, just have a blank document out there, but I decided to keep the chapters I had brainstormed anyway because, in a sense, it is a response to a call for chapters.  If people don't like these chapters, as a collaborative book, they can change them.

If you're interested, go to the planning document, see what chapters are there and if you like a certain chapter just add you name (don't forget to go to the botton of the document and put a mini biography as well so we know who you are and how to get a hold of you).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil...
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have ...
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...
Read more