Multilitteratus Incognitus

Last year when I put out the call for the  Great Big MOOC Book , one of the submissions came from a colleague in Australia who is going to write a bit about MOOC experiments that they ran on the Australian Open2Study platform , which is sponsored by the Open University of Australia.  I had heard of the platform before, but I never really tried it out since I was testing out other platforms at the time.  Well, since there wasn't much on Coursera to keep me going (too much of the same makes for a dull MOOC), and since rhizo14 is winding down (to some extent) I decided it was time to check out this platform. I originally signed up for two topics: Teaching Adult Learners , and Becoming and Confident Trainer . The Adult Learner topic was mostly to see what others say about the topic since I've already taken courses on this topic as part of my master's coursework.  The confident trainer was a bit of a repetition, but it was also an interesting look into corporate train...

Last week I was somewhere between work, teaching, the NERCOMP symposium I co-facilitated and the annual Sloan Consortium Emerging Tech for Online conference. It was nice to see some familiar MOOC faces on both twitter and on the live stream presentations. I think it was in Jen Ross's presentation (of EDCMOOC fame) that a Rhizo14 participant was quoted anonymously.  I really didn't think much about it at the time. It was more of an "wow, I didn't think rhizo was really that well known outside of some crazy circles."  In any case, it turns out that the quote was from the autoethnography that we are working on (slowly but surely I guess), and that no permission was sought to use the quote.  Before I knew the specifics the prompt on the rhizo14 facebook group was: I have to admit that my gut reaction was "someone's watching? Who's reading our stuff?" But, I should point out, that this isn't indicative of a  negative reaction, but rather a ...

Well, it's the end of the week (or the beginning if you are following Western conventions with the odd behavior of calling "Sunday" the beginning of the week), grading for my course, for this week, is done, and it's time to see what I missed on Rhizo14 while I was tending to other things.  One of the things that we are putting together (in addition to the long autoethnography for #rhizo14) is this other research, which I would call Delphi based in its methodology, on why we take MOOCs, why we participate in them, and why we stick, or not stick, to them. I thought that this would be something interesting to participate in since I am not sure I've recorded why I've been participating in MOOCs (as you will note, the MOOC tag is the biggest one on this blog). The other epithets used online, thus far, for those who keep engaging in MOOCs is MOOCaholic .  I don't know if I like that epithet because it doesn't necessarily describe me right at this momen...

Well,  we are in Week 9 (or 13) in the course I am teaching this semester, and the badges experiment is continuing!  This weekend, as I was reading assignment submissions, I saw that some students, in their design documents, have started incorporating Web 2.0 tools (should we just call them "web tools" now?) that encourage the use, formation, or exploration of personal learning environments (PLE).  Thus, this week the penultimate secret badge has been revealed, and it is the  No Walled Gardens badge. Criteria : The earner of this badge has incorporated at least two Web 2.0 tools and/or services into the design of their LMS-based online course. This design is incorporated in such a way that it should prompt students in that course to start developing their own PLEs. Rationale: Now, I understand that not everyone will be able to incorporate this aspect into their courses, especially the students who are working in corporate training or health-care training and...

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: ...

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 th...

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...