Drinking from the firehose!

Well, the Bonk MOOC (Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success) is almost at the end of Week 1.  There certainly is  A LOT of discussion going on, with more than 3000 registered participants; at least that was the number at last count. I honestly would LOVE to see the analytics at the end of the MOOC.  That would certainly be some cool data to crunch (and perhaps write an article about).

In any case, both on #bonkopen and in other MOOCs, there has been a sentiment made clear by some participants that they feel like they are drinking from a firehose.  If you are a traditional learner (as in you come from a face to face course environment, or a traditional online course environment) you may feel like there is too much information. Some people want to create smaller cohorts, after all Blackboard Learn supports groups.  I don't mean to be insensitive when I roll my eyes at comments like this; I am sorry if I offend anyone - this is not my intention. I think that the sanctioned forking of a massive online course kinda defeats the purpose of having that diversity of opinion. Also, if you have a small group, wouldn't you still feel like you are missing out on what's happening in other groups?

The best analogy that I have for this feeling of being overwhelmed is the library.  Have you been to a library lately? A big magnificent library with many thousands of tomes of books? Or heck, even a small library with a few thousands of books? Do you feel like you are drinking from a firehose?  Of course not! The library has been there for all of our natural lives and we've formed a frame, a lens through which we view knowledge in a library.  We don't have to start at A and finish at Z in order to get the most out of the library - we need to look for interesting abstracts, titles and authors - then we pick books that we want to read.

MOOCs are sort of similar.  There is absolutely no need to read every single post and respond to every single participant. To do so would be pure crazyness! No one has that much time, and you probably won't get much more out of the experience than picking a few threads/blogs/people and really engaging.  Just like you don't treat a lecture and a seminar the same way in a face to face class, you don't treat traditional online courses and MOOCs the same way.  There is a different frame of mind that goes along with MOOCs, and a different set of learning skills :-)  This is why we are here, your fellow participants, to share best practices in learning, and to help you discover your own!

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