New Month, new MOOCs, new learning, more grazing?

September is here! New academic year has begun, the campus is again full of life (and lacking parking), and I am back to school as a student, this time at Athabasca University!  I am also looking forward to a number of MOOCs that are beginning this month, among them Connected Courses, which promises to be an interesting cMOOC.  Perhaps I am insulting the course by calling it a MOOC (MOOCs these days seem to have a bad reputation), but it seems like the label that works best for it at the moment.  When compared to xMOOCs, there aren't a lot of cMOOCs offered, so time to savor the learning opportunity here.

Once again I've signed up for quite a few MOOCs (almost all of them xMOOCs) on coursera and futurelearn but I've decided on a different tactic for them.  I've decided to give grazing a try.  In previous attempts at MOOC learning I've been quite determined to follow the path set out by the course designers and facilitators.  Dot every i, and cross every t. The freedom of cMOOCs meant that I could define some of those objectives on my own, but xMOOCs, with their certificates of completion, had meant that there was an element of external motivation (carrot or stick, you decide) that was there that was poking at my need for collecting "stuff", beyond the knowledge that I gained in the MOOC. I guess I needed to have that gold star that said I completed the course, that external recognition.

I've written about this before in another post - but I think it's something to be repeated: be weary of poorly implemented external motivators. They may erode the the scaffolding that was there before by those internal motivators, and if you pull the external motivators once that internal scaffolding is gone...well, you might have spectacular failure ;-). I came across this in an article (or two) a few years ago when I was working on the literature review for the Academic Check-ins article. I wish I had retained my notes from that time because these articles on motivation keep coming back into relevance in my explorations of MOOCs (maybe I should implement the filing system that Pat Fahy demonstrated in our EDDE 801 orientation going forward!)

Anyway, back to the point, now that certain courses no longer offer a certificate of completion, I am thinking hard about my time investment in these xMOOCs and deciding where to devote my limited time. Some courses don't have content that is new to me, but I signed up for them regardless because there is always a nugget of info you might be missing, and there is opportunity to engage with others. The videos and readings represent the nugget of info while the assignments (and to some extent the forums) represent interactions with others.  I have enough time to watch the lectures (commuting makes this possible), but not enough time for writing and engaging with others. Thus, I am saving my writing for courses like Connected Courses where the engagement between peers promises to be higher, instead of taking on the role of the more knowledgeable other in the xMOOCs I am signed up for. I've decided to give this dip-in/jump-out idea a bit more of a trial this semester and practice some xMOOC grazing, going through and cherry-picking materials (mostly video) from courses that seem interesting, but not really engaging a lot in the community. I guess I will be going to the lurking side this semester :)

As a side note, as I was pondering about this course, and trying to get comfortable with my grazing experiment (maybe I should call it my filtering experiment, maybe it has a better ring to it), I thought about this.  I do not know if it's an original thought (probably not), but here it goes: A good course has the capability to engage the learner long after the course is formally over.

What are your thoughts? How you do deal with the glut of xMOOCs available? What do you think of my course design philosophy?

Comments

Apostolos K. ("AK") said…
Doing = learning
Motivation ~ Purpose, Autonomy, Mastery
#ccourses promises to be a "party not to be missed"
So many cool people!
September 3, 2014 at 11:36 AM
sensor63 said…
If courses have elaborate determined paths with assignments I don't get to graze - I walk on to hunt for more open environments :-)
September 4, 2014 at 1:03 AM
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