Multilitteratus Incognitus

Now that I am back from vacation (was off to Spain, but spent a little time in Istanbul on the way to and from), it's time to catch up a bit on EDDE 806. On the day that I was flying out to begin my vacation A lec Couros was presenting....D'oh!  I missed the opportunity to be live in that 806.  Not only was Alec on, but there was also a fellow EDDE student who is also Greek.  It would have been glorious to have so many Greeks on on 806 session. Oh well - maybe next time :p In any case, Alec's presentation was titled "The Making of an Open & Connected Educator" which was really interesting.  Parts of what he presented on were familiar to me because I've been following Alec since 2011 when I got into MOOCs, and I learned more about ED&C 831 (his open course). Parts of what he presented were new to me.  For instance I didn't know he was a school teacher before he got into his current career.  Props to anyone who is a school teacher - I don...

One of the items I've wanted to comment on for a while was a blog post posted by friend and colleague Rebecca Hogue .  Rebecca writes that she teaches courses (similar, or the same courses as I do at UMB anyway) and these courses would be well served by a decent eBook that is published (and updated) for the course.  I wholeheartedly agree!  For the past half a decade I've been thinking about trying to put together an edited volume for the introductory course in instructional design†, or just write the book myself. I've been thinking that this should be open access, given my philosophical leanings toward open access for education, however - just like Rebecca - I am not paid to teach full time. I teach because I like it, and I like to mentor others. Writing a book (or putting something edited together) takes up a lot of time and effort, and of course that needs to be maintained.  Expecting that someone will do it for free is not realistic.  It's a good thing...

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...