Multilitteratus Incognitus

So, the other day I was at the NERCOMP annual conference.  I heard a few people speak (cool stuff), and I also got an opportunity to chat with people, and be a nosy eavesdropper on other people's conversations.   One of the things that came up, as has come up elsewhere in the past three or so years, has been the concept of MOOCs as OER and MOOCs as OCW.  We've actually seen this with xMOOCs like Udacity as having their content labeled as open courseware. EdX uses the term "courseware" for their course materials on their MOOCs, whether they are open is an entirely different discussion.  Even my third MOOC ever (mobimooc 2011) had stated that the materials would remain as OER after the end of the MOOC. Then, I started to think about Dave Cormier's question, or potentially a challenge, on how to introduce newbie to the Rhizo14 MOOC that ended five weeks ago, but we are still active, on facebook at least.  All of this got me thinking about two things:  first, what

I am attending, and presenting, at NERCOMP 2014 today. As I was checking Blackboard over the past couple of days and "grading" feedback pieces submitted by my students, I noticed an interesting trend in the feedback (and some emails sent by students) that reminded me of #Rhizo14 (week 2?): encouraging independence. We are now in week 8 (of 13) in this course and students are put into groups of three from now until the end of the semester. They are each working on their own, independent, final project - but they are in peer review groups. The question that I got, from a lot of students, was "what are we supposed to do in our groups?" Of course, I am paraphrasing here, but the underlying current was: we've assigned groups, well now what? what do you want us to do?  I should point out here that this is the 3rd round of groups in this course.  The first two were self-selecting groups, so in the third one I stepped in to make sure that people were working w

Well, it seems one more week has passed by in INSDSG619, and one more badge had been earned by some learners, and therefore revealed to everyone! Last week the Discussion Initiator was revealed, and this week, the Discussion Kinder has come out! Discussion Kindler Description: This badge is awarded to students who have made an effort to keep the discussion going by responding to peers and helping to tease out nuances in the discussion. Criteria:  For at least six weeks (half the semester), a student needs to post at least 5 responses to peer contributed posts per week. These replies to peers' posts need to meet the full rubric criteria for responses Rationale: Over the past few years, both teaching and observing online posting behaviors of students, I've noticed that there are some students that go the extra mile and post more than the minimum of required replies to their peers.  Thus, they keep the discussion going, they ask expository questions, they guide the

We are now in the middle of Week 7 (of 13) of the course I am teaching (INSDSG 619: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses) and one more of the secret badge is revealed! Discussion Initiator Criteria:  Must hit all elements of the discussion board grading rubric, Must be the first to respond in any given week, Must be a post that encourages other to respond and engage in discussion (i.e. have at least 3 responses to it), Must be a post that kindles the discussion (i.e. Original poster needs to respond to fellow student's responses, not ignore his/her own post), Rationale: I've noticed over the past three years that I've been teaching that there are some students who always (or often) take the leap and start the weekly discussion off by contributing an initial discussion forum post for that week.  I do know, from my conversations with current and past students, that there are some students who prefer to stay back for a few days, see what other people writ

Alright, so I guess we are entering the final frontier of #rhizo14 here, with week 11.  Perhaps I should stop counting weeks and call this series of posts "This Week in Rhizo14" ;-)  Last week I missed some discussions on P2PU, which I've gone back and answered some questions directed to me, but I think this ends my formal mingling in P2PU for Rhizo14 and I will focus more one the PLE aspect on Facebook and the blog. There were a number of interesting discussions last week.  Rebecca asks, in her blog, about the value of Blogging , this coming from one of her students this semester. While I have posted on Rebecca's blog, I thought I would discuss a little more here about educational blogging and this blog. In 2008 I needed a blog for education purposes. It was a class requirement, so I started ID Stuff, which is what I use now for MOOCs and other educational blogging. Before that I had blogged about a variety of topics, so I kept the title of the blog more encompa

Well, It's week 9 of Rhizo14 (or week 3 of the after party of rhizo14, depending on how you look at it.)  Last week we had a discussion on de-mobing teachers (I guess enabling teachers to not teach to the test?). To be honest I lurked a bit last week on facebook since the day job, the other work obligations, the DML conference (which was awesome!) and subsequent weekend food poisoning made me miss out on Rhizo, and get behind on the FutureLearn Corpus Linguistics course. Anyway, how apropos that we've just promoted the Week 10 topic to Week 9!  All about Lurkers! The overall question proposed for Week 9 is "Why do we need lurkers?" If you go back through my MOOC blog posts, which at the moment number somewhere in the 170 range (how the heck did that happen?) you can see that I haven't really thought much about lurkers in MOOCs, and in thinking about designing MOOCs, I don't think of lurkers much then either. The reason I don't think of lurkers muc

The other day I caught a post by Lenandlar on the #Rhizo14 MOOC which is over, but we amazingly are keeping it going.  At the end of his post on motivation that I wanted to address, since they've been on my mind and they've come up a few times in the past week. Are MOOC participants in favor of shorter or longer videos or it doesn’t matter?   I can't speak for all MOOC participants, I can only speak for myself, and from my own experiences. I can say that video length  does matter, but it's not just about the video length.  On average, I would say that you don't need a video that is longer than 20 minutes. My feeling is that if I want to watch a documentary, I will watch a documentary, not participate in a MOOC. Anything longer than 20 minutes is probably unfocused and not suitable to the medium and the goals of the course. Of course, simply having 20 minutes to work with doesn't mean that you should take up all that time.  This goes back to figuring ou

Last week was the last formal week of #rhizo14.  Even though we crazy lunatics have taken over Dave's P2PU course site and are continuing the course on our own (for now), life goes on and other MOOCs start and finish.  This week was the week I completed the Introduction to Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam , and the course Diseño, Organización y Evaluación de videojuegos y gamificación (design, organization, and evaluation of video games, and gamification)from the Universidad Europea, using the Miriadax platform. The former was taught in English, using the all too familiar Coursera model, while the latter was taught presented entirely in Spanish (with one or two interviews in English). The Communications course isn't technically over, next week in the final week, but the final exam was this week.  Since I am done with both, I think it's good to have a little post-mortem analysis. Coursera - Intro to Communication The novelty that got me into thi