Multilitteratus Incognitus

Today is a new day, and a new topic in OLDSMOOC.  Well, not so much a topic as a winding down on the learning process that has been occurring in this MOOC. On the topic of evaluation , there was an interesting discussion on the Google Group: is it the life blood of learning design or the bane of our existence? My, short, response was as follows: I think that there is a happy medium between the two. I do believe that evaluation and iteration (based on evaluation findings) are at the core of good learning design, but, by the same token, I do believe that there are people that can take it to the extreme. This then, can become, that tax (or smelly cod oil as someone else put it) in the learning design.  I think that if there isn't adequate evaluation (formative and summative) then a lot of learning design efforts can go to waste. We are not perfect beings (no matter how much we may think we are ;-) ), so we will not be getting something right on the first try. Evaluation ...

It's week 7 in OLDSMOOC, and as we are windowing down we are tackling the topic of Evaluation . I will be switching tracks again, from the Blended Mobile Learning course (that I've been working on for a while), and going back to the idea of offering the course as a cMOOC. Going through OLDSMOOC I've gotten some good ideas about how to implement my own cMOOC.  I've been thinking a lot about the recommended paths that are available in some weeks (the short and the long path). This, in combination with badging, and deliverable, is making me think about the assessment aspect of the MOOC; but let's not get sidetracked, let's talk about evaluation. In terms of evaluation decisions, what immediately comes to mind are these: Should the content for this learning design be expanded, reduced, or remain the same? One of the tricky things about MOOCs is that you will always have critics, since there will be instances (many of them) where the MOOC does not hit the sweet sp...

This was shared as part of OLDSMOOC, but I thought it would be a good resource for any beginning instructional designer :-) Week 7 term_review from Thomas Reeves

OK, s, I (re)discovered that there are some crowd-sourced badges. I knew this in the first week of the course, but somewhere along the lines I forgot about them (probably because I wasn't planning on applying for those badges anyway ;-)  ) In any case, if you are participating in OLDSMOOC, do have a look at the badge application page , and help out a fellow oldsmoocer!  I'm doing my part right now! The first person 's materials I examined are Tiffany Crosby's. Tiffany has a project in mind to create a "business psychology course that combines facets of psychology, sociology, business ethics, fraud and ford endive, and decision-making." I think this sounds interesting, and it reminds me a bit of my Business Ethics course that I took while I was an MBA student (this was a really nice course!). As part of the deliverables for the badge she is seeking, she submitted the results of her card sort activity , and the course map for her course. From what I saw i...

It's week 6 of 9 in OLDSMOOC† and the topic is Curation of content , and one of the major areas is Open Educational Resources (or OER).  I had to go back to last summer, when I was working on the #ioe12 MOOC, and the week that was specifically tackling the topic of OER to see what I wrote then on the topic. I think my main "complain" about OER is that it, in addition to spending time to find OER resources, you also have to, usually spend, a lot of time on editing and adapting the OER for usage in your own classroom. After all, materials are designed with certain uses, users, and criteria in mind, and those uses, users, and criteria may not match your own LD/ID analysis.  Thus, the process isn't one of  Seeking & Deploying , but rather  Seeking, Evaluating, Modifying, Testing, Deploying . The process then can become a rabbit hole, where if you jump in too deep, you feel vested in the outcome and you probably don't want to scrap your current work on OER, if y...

I came across this pretty interesting TED talk on the loss of wisdom, hidden knowledge and skills, the reductionism in what we do. It's a must-see :)

This week, on OLDSMOOC, the subject was prototyping , and all has been very quiet in the MOOC. I am not sure if people are busy prototyping (and thus not talking a lot), or if people have taken a small break from the MOOC :-) Since I decided to focus on the Blended version of my mLearning course (and not try to make a MOOC out of it just yet - mostly due to time issues), I took the stand-back and see approach to this week. I did read the materials (which reminded me of my User Interface Design course - that was a lot of fun!) but I didn't have a ton of time to prototype anything. Instead, I decided to help out and test other people's prototypes. If you need a guinea pig, let me know ;-) Here is (one of) the presentation for this week: OLDSMOOC week 5: Simple prototyping techniques by Diana Laurillard from OLDSMOOC

Last fall, when I was on an xMOOC-binge, I decided to sign up for a MOOC called Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application (#foemooc). I knew the subject matter, but I decided to participate so I can compare notes. After all, I am teaching what is the same course online this semester in a non-MOOC format. I was also curious how it would be done in a MOOC format because I've been thinking about designing some courses that could work "natively" in the MOOC format, like Connectivism and Connected Knowledge where some students take it for credit, while others just take it because they are interested in the course. In any case, work got the better of me, and instead of focusing on xMOOCs, I decided to focus on good ol' cMOOCs, since those are the MOOCs that are pushing the envelope on pedagogy; so I dropped #foemooc in January. It also didn't help that #foemooc was misunderstood by some (and therefore advertised among the blogosphere and twittersphe...

This week I was messing around with the pedagogical patterns collector ( see here ) to see what the predefined patterns were in the system (and applied some to my Blended Intro to mLearning course . I didn't think that the Patterns would be good for a MOOC environment, but I also didn't have much time to mess around in creating a MOOC-appropriate Patterns and associated TLA (teaching learning activities).  So here are two samples of what the machine gave me back based on my inputs (see end of blog post) All things considered, the PPC was an easy and interesting tool to use. It reminded me a lot of the Absorb, Do, Connect sequence of activities that Horton talks about , something I picked up when I was an Intstructional Design student. SAMPLE 1: Apply research based based approach in the practice under study TLA 1 - Introduction Students read through the introductory material explaining the role of research based approaches to Mobile Learning Project Design (independent ...

Even though this was a Week 3 activity, I took the opportunity to mess around a bit more with the Course Features Cards and actually snap photos of the outcomes. For this, I decided to focus more on the Blended version of the Introduction to mLearning , and not the MOOC version of the course since I wanted to focus on something I had a little more hashed out (the MOOC version will require a lot more thinking than I have time to right now :-) ) Activity 1 Directions: Choose a maximum of 12 cards from the pack which define key features of your course or module. The cards are grouped into four categories : Guidance and Support (marked GS / coloured Orange ) Content and Experience (marked CE / coloured Green  Communication and Collaboration (marked CC / Blue coloured  ) Reflection and Demonstration (marked RD / Purple coloured Now look at your cards you have selected: Are any colours of cards missing or less well represented?  If so, what might be the impact on...