Don't close the doors yet - OLDSMOOC has one more thing!

I got an email the other day that I was awarded a badge on OLDSMOOC (one of the peer reviewed badges), which prompted me to go into Cloudworks to see if there were any more peers that needed evaluating.  I had already completed one peer review (see here for the first one) so why not complete a second one?

It turns out that Itana Gimenes had submitted all her materials for the Learning Designer badge, so I decided to have a look and see what sort of review or feedback I could give her :)

Itana's course design revolves around Agile Software Engineering, something that brings me back to my MBA days when I was working on my IT concentration.  Back then we briefly touched upon Agile methodology since it was new, but now it's much more prevalent. In any case, I found it interesting that she was wondering (scrutinizing her own design in Week 2) the type of support learners would get so that they could both learn and have a realistic (authentic?) experience in Agile Methodology.  I am actually wondering how one could run a class using Agile.  I think when we teach (unless we lecture and don't shut up until the class is over) that we are agile, but I am curious to explore this a bit more. I think there is an opportunity here to incorporate agile methodologies in teaching so that learners are learning Agile methodologies, applying them, and seeing them in action.  Who knows, maybe someone has already done this, if so, kindly post some citations in the comments :-).

In Week 3, she has posted the results of her card activity, and there is one thing that doesn't stick well for me:  Exam Assessment.  It would seem to me that this course is more of a project-based course, learning about Agile software development while doing agile software development. The Exam doesn't seem to quite fit the bill for me for assessment.  I could be convinced, I just need to know why an exam is important :-)  Here I would have to say that my conception of an exam is a sit-down exam with multiple choice questions and short answers.  Maybe the conceived exam format is different than the one that comes to mind for me.

Her course map for this course is pretty interesting. I wanted to pick out two things:
  1. Under Reflection & Demonstration, the learners are meant to have a personal reflection blog for the course. I think this is a great idea. I think of it as a developer's blog where the progress (as well as frustrations) are documented, and perhaps this is where the community can help a bit
  2. Under Communication & Collaboration I see that "Synchronous interaction should be avoided." Now, don't get me wrong, I hate pointless syncrhonous communication, but why should it be avoided?  What if learners find it useful, in their dev-teams, to have synchronous communication for team meetings?  I think this point needs to be teased out a bit more. (This is something that seems to be a question in one of her subsequent MOOC deliverables, including an evaluation)
Overall I think the course is on a good track.  I think that the communication aspect needs to be teased out a little more, and perhaps make some tie-ins to help learners become better communicators.  One major point of failure in the agile process (in my opinion), is bad communication which can snowball into a giant monster. I think providing learners with some good guidelines for communication as part of this course would be beneficial.

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