ScHARR MOOC Diaries - Part XVII - Gold Rush or just Fool's Gold - A Quick Look at the Literature

Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) Licence. © http://www.flickr.com/photos/opensourceway/

Anyone following the evolution of MOOCs might agree that the M in Massive does not just apply exclusively to the number of participants. It could also be applied to the sheer number of articles, posts, papers, posters, reviews and events that appear every single day, this blog piece being one such example - apologies for clogging up your news feed.

Whenever I see Professor Brian Cox on the BBC explaining something mind-blowing about the Universe he always uses big numbers, 13.7 Billion years ago it all kicked off, so on and so forth. And that is how it can feel with regards to MOOCs, 160,000 students here, 80,000 there. The number of articles being written every week shows no sign of slowing down, so much so that if you were to put every word together (size 12 font) written about MOOCs it would stretch to Alpha Centuri and back 17 times over...probably.

All of this literature has lead to several ideas on where MOOCs are going and try to push them in that direction. We have cMOOCs to xMOOCs, and no doubt other variations - personally I’d like to push BOOCs (Boutique Open Online Course). Added with that are the idea of badges, certificates, merchandise, professional pathways and fee paying MOOCs delivered by industry experts to name but a few.

Even though MOOCs are not a new thing and can be traced back in one form or another to the last century, the last year has seen a massive upheaval in higher education as Universities decide it is better to be in than out. Whether in the long term MOOCs turn out to be the educational Emperor's New Clothes nobody knows. One thing for certain as new ideas and institutions appear on the scene it does start to look like a gold rush of the 19th Century. The result of that rush was that a lot of people got very rich whilst others perished and died. Articles have been written predicting that MOOCs will herald a new era for openness and innovation in learning whilst others see it as the beginning of the end for many institutions. All, in all, MOOCs have been one ‘massive’ wake up call for higher education.

Following the topic on my ScoopIt page and via Twitter searches amongst other systems I have certainly seen a shift in how MOOCs are being viewed with many of the earlier articles reflecting the movement in positive terms. As more and more articles appeared the predictable counter-arguments started to surface. There are two possible reasons for this, the first being that MOOCs have not brought about the changes and benefits we expected ‘just yet’ and therefore attracted criticism. The University of California announced last year that in fiscal terms, their MOOCs had not panned out as they would have wished. This openness and other examples from how to set up a MOOC (such as documented in the blog) have helped document and shape how other institutions run their courses and potentially learn from failures and successes. Whilst the other reason for the negative articles can be simply put down to something my old journalism lecturer used to call ‘perverse journalism’. This meaning taking the opposite argument from the rest, purely to stir up debate. There have been a few articles writing about the apocalypse that will befall most global universities now MOOCs are with us. The End of History and The Last MOOCs highlighting the most radical of futures where: “The last MOOCs will most probably serve independently as academic ATMs for delivery of resources, tests and “academic credits”, charging just few cents per transaction.”

The chances are that given the global financial climate and growth in higher education in Asia that some universities may fall by the wayside. ‘Who’, ‘how many’ and ‘when’ is anybody’s guess.  I’m a keen fan of The Gartner Hype Cycle which I apply to countless technologies and ideas including MOOCs, something that Timothy Chester writing for Educause touches on in his article Why MOOCs are Like Farmville. Chester believes we are at the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’ with regards to the Gartner Hype Cycle. It would be interesting to find out if he felt we had slipped into the trough of disillusionment about now. Chester compared MOOCs with the huge Facebook game ‘Farmville’ in that: “that failed to live up to their early hype and were doomed by poor quality and a lack of financial support”. Of course it is not that simple as institutions are all having different experiences, tackling the development of their courses differently and at different stages of delivery. Nevertheless there are some critics who do believe we are in the trough of disillusionment and it might not get any better. The report on Australian Universities by Ernst and Young opened with the line: ‘Over the next 10-15 years, the current public university model in Australia will prove unviable in all but a few cases’. 10-15 years is a long time and with regards MOOCs it is hard to predict where we will be in one year’s time. On a more positive note Alan Cann from the University of Leicester argued on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog that MOOCs would eventually augment higher education not replace it. The human element of learning and MOOCs is touched on by Douglas Rushkoff for CNN who shows concern for the future of education regardless of MOOCs, saying: “Now that this massive collaborative learning project has succeeded, it would be a shame if we used it to take the humanity out of learning altogether“. Certainly on a similar theme Mark Guzdial wrote about existing issues highlighted by MOOCs in his article, saying: “MOOCs do what the external world thinks that University teachers do”.

As for another kind of openness, looking at the institutions who have released post course data such as The University of Edinburgh and their EDC MOOC, the early signs are that MOOCs are still very westernised as you would imagine as they are being delivered predominantly from the west. In addition still mostly taken by people who already have studied at an academic institution. over 70% participants who completed surveys from the EDC MOOC confirmed they have at least studied at undergraduate level. So in terms of them being massive, online and courses we can all agree on, the open part is still yet to be fully exploited as most of what appears to have been written or talked about is within academic settings. Completion rates continue to be a thorny issue for MOOCs and how they are reported, Julia Lawrence writing for Education News is just one article critical of this in her article MOOCs May Have a Long Way to Go Before They’re Effective. I believe despite their growth in the academic setting, if you were to go up to 10 strangers in the street you may just find one who could tell you what a MOOC was. Yet that should all change following high profile coverage such as a piece on BBC’s Newsnight for example. As Justin Reich wrote about MOOCs and Higher Education’s Non-Consumers arguing if this form of learning was truly going to disrupt higher education it would need non-consumers to play a critical role.

A good synopsis of what is potentially good and bad about MOOCs is captured in the slideshare presentation by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at Open University. His presentation titled Surviving the Day of MOOCs, set to some apocalyptic - or should that be MOOCalyptic as I keep reading - background THAT gives five reasons why to do a MOOC and five opposing it. Another article by Cathy Davidson called for unity rather than polarisation in the MOOC debate bringing the bigger issue of higher education in general to the table.Davidson said: “Whatever else one may think about MOOCS, their vast popularity proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that very many people want – really, really want – more not less higher learning.”

Certainly from my own perspective, MOOCs can have the appearance of academic phishing, with institutions trying to hook the attention of masses of students by getting as many on board as possible, but that is the nature of entities being online period, so why should education be different? There are several articles talking about the quality of courses and even websites focussing on it, such as Mooc News & Reviews. An article by  Scott Carlson and Goldie Blumenstyk titled: ‘For Whom the College Being Reinvented?’ highlighted the interesting suggestion by Peter J. Stokes, executive director for postsecondary innovation at Northeastern's College of Professional Studies. Stokes said the: “whole MOOC thing is mass psychosis," a case of people "just throwing spaghetti against the wall" to see what sticks”.

An interesting thought, but one befitting higher education given that experimentation can be very much part of the learning and discovery process. Going to one of my favourite ever quotes, Einstein once said that: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Links:

The End of History and The Last MOOCs

Why MOOCs are Like Farmville

University of the Future

After the gold rush: MOOCs are augmenting rather than replacing formal educational models

MOOCs May Have a Long Way to Go Before They’re Effective.

UC Online Strives to Compete in an Era of Free Courses

MOOCs are a fundamental misperception of how teaching works

Online courses need human element to educate

Stop polarising the MOOCs debateFor Whom Is College Being Reinvented?

MOOCs and Higher Education’s Non-Consumers

The ScHARR MOOC Diaries part VII - Jack and the Giant Course - Getting a MOOC to Market

Jack and the Giant Course - Getting a MOOC to Market

'The Only Way is Up' - © Luke Miller - Image used under a Creative Commons By Attribution  Licence 

When creating a MOOC there are several factors you have to consider, all of which eats up precious time. From the previous posts on whether we can actually do this to deciding on a platform, and pulling a team of experts together, we can see that setting up and running a MOOC is no easy thing - and we’ve not even got on to the other 'M' word just yet - marketing.

Marketing in the traditional sense is quite simple, you identify a target group who you think might be interested in your product and push it that way. MOOCs are quite different from that, first of all we are running three health-related courses, which naturally is of interest to a wide range of people and organisations, from the NHS to BUPA, from governing bodies to charities, from health practitioners to members of the general public, and ultimately this can be applied on a global scale.

So the courses are truly global in their appeal as we are all interested in our health and that of others in some way. This potentially means there are a lot of interested parties and individuals that we want to get the message to and as I said earlier, running a MOOC is labour intensive regardless of marketing. 

By Colin (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Colin

So with that in mind we are treating the marketing of our MOOCs like an onion, that there are many layers we need to peel back.

Firstly starting closest to home we already have a cohort of current health-research students on site, most of whom are from Africa and Asia. As we saw in Dan Smith’s post on managing participant enrolment we have managed to entice students from that part of the globe to our MOOCs. Certainly the anecdotal evidence from a lot of MOOCs is that the majority are being undertaken by people who either have a higher education background, whether as students or staff. Certainly every MOOC seems to attract students who are academic staff who are either interested in the course content or more often how the MOOC is run. The real untapped potential of MOOCs is that they begin to attract the greater numbers of students who have not attended a higher education establishment before in addition to those from parts of the world where this is much harder to attain specialist health education..

We also want our staff to enrol on the courses, whether just for the in-house pilot we plan to run ahead of the first course or as students when they are formally released. The main reasons being that they get to not only see and feel what it’s like to be in a MOOC, but to be a distance learner as some may go on to deliver learning via our various e-learning channels.

The next layers are the Faculty of Medicine of which we are part of, with over 1000 staff and several 1000 students we want them to take part in the first MOOC at the University of Sheffield. Much of this marketing will and has taken place via internal electronic mailing lists, personal contacts, our ScHARR MOOC Diary Blog and the University Learning Technology Blog. Then there is the whole University, again the courses will be publicised as previously mentioned but will also include features on our University homepage, thus taking us beyond the University firewall, which has huge potential. On campus we can employ traditional marketing methods including posters, newsletters and business cards. Whilst any colleagues travelling to conferences and events have been encouraged to take our MOOC materials with them.

It’s beyond this firewall where much of our marketing will take place and for this to happen more effectively we need champions and support beyond our MOOC team. This comes from internal experts who work in our marketing and media teams to help channel the news of our MOOCs to established contacts with national and international organisations. We are based in Sheffield, at a University that has strong ties with the local community, a community that has inequalities in the quality of health of its population.

So it’s fitting that our courses, one of which is on the said topic reaches out to those with an interest in it. We plan to promote the courses to local organisations, the two large teaching hospitals, charities and individuals who will benefit from this open sharing of health education. We have good connections with the local media, from BBC Radio Sheffield to the Sheffield newspapers, who really can reach out to the local population. 

It’s at this point that a need for translation becomes much more important, for those of us who have worked at an academic institution and gotten our heads around MOOCs it is all too simple to forget that to others things can get lost in translation - how many people outside of a university knows what a MOOC is? 

As someone who spent a lot of time reporting on council and court proceedings as a journalism student some many years ago I learned how important it was to turn council-speak and legalese into something that the person on the street could understand. Talking about MOOCs is OK, but sometimes we have to understand that not everyone knows what it is, and why it may be different from another online course that is free. By writing a simple one page ‘press release’ or offering FAQs and glossary of terms we remove much of the barriers that sometimes intimidates those who have never set foot on an academic campus.

The courses are of massive potential for the NHS, an organisation where staff often struggle to find time or funds for carrying on professional development. Reaching out to the NHS is not always that easy due to the scale of the organisation and barriers set around it, so champions are needed. As for champions they rarely come more enthusiastic or connected than health librarians with a huge network of NHS libraries to collaborate with. Libraries are often the central hub of health organisations, so are an ideal place to help spread the courses organically. The altruistic nature of MOOCs has been a driving force for us at ScHARR and by including the NHS as best as we can it feels we are giving something back to this important workforce. As the marketing starts to extend nationally and globally it becomes increasingly important that the duplication of effort is paid attention to. Anyone involved in running a MOOC can transmit the courses via their personal networks, and over time the need for a single uninformed message explaining in simple terms what the courses and MOOCs in general are about. The plan to explore is by collaborating with journalists, academics and established bloggers based in the health education sector by sending press packs. These packs will include short briefs on each course, something about MOOCs, and ScHARR, poster materials and business cards.

Video is also an important part of our marketing strategy and we have already recorded our first one wit Dr Angie Clonan introducing our MOOCs.

According to technology giant Cisco Systems, video is forecast to be the dominant format for mobile and computers and with YouTube uploading 72 hours of content for every hour we have understood at ScHARR for some time that video is increasingly an effective way to communicate, teach and learn.

Discussion and mailing lists may have been around for decades but still remain an important communication tool for discussing everything from health to communication. The opportunities for marketing the courses is extensive. These will include JISC mail lists, Environment Job, Charity Job email lists to name but a few.

In addition, video channels (such as YouTube and Vimeo) and other social media channels are being explored. This obviously means targeting Facebook and their groups, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Academia.Edu, Mendeley Groups, alongside other the micro-blogging giant Twitter. Already we have seen spikes in our enrolment numbers potentially attributed to the little bird and tweets we’d posted about our MOOCs. We have already employed the #scharrmoocs hashtag via our @ScHARRsheffield and @openScHARR accounts and posted on our ScHARR Facebook pages. At the University we have been using Google Apps for Education for nearly two years now and many of the #scharrmoocs team are active on Google+ as a result sharing updates on the courses there.

The ScHARR MOOCs for this summer/autumn are all hosted on the Blackboard platform Coursesites as discussed in our second post. This brings our courses to the huge number of students already undertaking courses there. Our courses are part of the catalogue of courses hosted by other institutions that will hopefully bring additional students to our course, with the benefit of many already using the Coursesites platform previously to undertake a MOOC.

There are countless avenues for anyone starting up a MOOC and we’ve only covered a few here. It very much depends on your target audience, but the MOO in MOOC is a clue as to how you promote your course. They are potentially massive, and certainly on-line and open, so the sky is literally the limit as to how far you pitch them. The only real limit is a big one and that is resources, getting the message out there effectively is no small thing. Following up posts and mail outs and checking for responses in threads and groups could potentially take up more resources. To go back to the analogy of the title, when you do start planting the seeds you are unsure of what will grow and how big it will get. With an effective marketing plan you not only have a better chance of making your MOOC massive but you also build the networks for future courses and for established communication channels with your students that begin before and hopefully do not end ‘ever-after’ the course has finished.

The ScHARR MOOC Diaries: Part IV - Will size matter...?

Will size matter...?  On MOOCs and going 'massive'.

First of all...

I'm excited by our ScHARR MOOCs project, because it is pulling onto centre-stage all sorts of questions about learning - and about what (and who) universities are for - that we often allow to drift away into the wings (or out of the theatre altogether).  In the last few years, my own role vis a vis teaching has increasingly been to lead and manage, more than delivering, and to be the place where the buck stops if something goes wrong.  And now here comes the opportunity to get on with some fresh new thinking about teaching and learning online, without US-style million-dollar investment, but with a huge fund of staff enthusiasm.  And with lots of interesting questions to answer, not least how 'massive' should we plan for our first MOOCs to be? How much will size matter?  Will any kind of innovative, interactive learning techniques survive a context in which there may be thousands or tens of thousands of people logging on? As outlined below, what started as a speculative set of questions and Google searches about size quickly led to other, broader questions.  I have found some useful, reflective articles while browsing - three of which are listed in the comments below. Each, in turn, opens the door to more resources and debates.

Before moving on with those themes, let me welcome the two members of staff who will be joining the team from now on to help get the ScHARR MOOCs up and running:

Angie Clonan:

http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/ph/staff/profiles/angieclonan

and

Katie Powell:  
http://www.shef.ac.uk/scharr/sections/ph/staff/profiles/katiepowell

Angie and Katie will each be working with the MOOCs team half-time, over the spring and summer - and will soon be posting their thoughts and suggestions in the Diaries.

MOOCs: size and other issues - some useful links

A little online browsing quickly tells me that the first MOOC was formally offered in 2008 in Canada, drawing on earlier collaborative online learning initiatives.  Technological innovations don't generally come out of a vacuum: there is always a context, usually populated by various jostling ideas and initiatives.  So MOOCs are not quite the new kid on the block that the current buzz of discussion in UK Higher Education circles might suggest.  For more detail on this point and others raised below, there is a very useful 2012 article here by Sir John Daniel, in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education:

http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/viewArticle/2012-18/html

Further browsing quickly brought up a distinction that has some relevance to the 'how massive?' question and related pedagogical themes: "cMOOCs" vs "xMOOCs"...         cMOOCs  emphasising a 'connectivist' and participatory approach, and xMOOCs adopting a more obviously commercial and 'broadcasting'  style and format:

"cMOOCs focus on knowledge creation and generation whereas xMOOCs focus on knowledge duplication."

(for the full discussion, see George Siemens' reflections at   http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/2012/07/25/moocs-are-really-a-platform/)

My first reaction to this distinction was to reflect that of course I (we?) would much prefer the 'connectivist' emphasis, with its roots in concepts of student-centred and participatory learning.  If  that means being less 'massive' but more 'creative and collaborative' - then good.  Quality rather than quantity.

But as George Siemens points out in the www.elearnspace piece cited above, there are many unresolved issues here.  He comments that learners from contexts and countries where there is little affordable access to high-quality learning materials say they welcome the accessible "xMOOCs" provision, often delivered by high-status US universities with global reputations.  Restricted access to bandwidth can also make the more interactive styles of online learning far less 'open' than we may think.  That thought, of course, immediately raises another question: will MOOCs  just entrench the domination of the big US players, marginalising other perspectives, networks and organisations?  Walmart/Asda/Tesco drives out not only the educational corner shop, but the deli, the butcher, the baker and the wholefoods cooperative too in a familiar pattern?

These points and others are raised in a recent piece on MOOCs published on the Institute of Development Studies website (To MOOC or not to MOOC'... see link after the quotation below) . This Insitute is a charitable organisation based at the University of Sussex. It attracted a comment from a current MOOC user that encourages a more optimistic and less polarised interpretation of MOOCs' potential, though also one that reminds us of the online accessibility issues:

"I live in Liberia and have organized a discussion group for people who are taking Banerjee and Duflo's 'Poor Economics' course online. The course is at https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/14.73x/2013_Spring/about. We have a group of half Liberians, half expatriate development workers. It's really interesting for us and eye-opening for the Liberian students who have never been exposed to cutting-edge, rigorous thinking in development before. It would be fantastic if IDS could do something similar. Bandwidth is a real problem for us, though, so it helps to keep online lectures and audio materials to a minimum, or, if you feel you must be 'multimedia', at least include a transcript of the lecture, and the slides. "

(http://www.developmenthorizons.com/2013/03/to-mooc-or-not-to-mooc-that-is-question.html )

So you may have a genuinely 'massive' MOOC; there may be thousands of people logging on who simply lurk and browse or consume the content without interacting online; and at the same time, there may be local groups who use their individual online learning as a springboard for shared agendas and creative ways of working.

Perhaps, then, we need to relax about the 'size' issue.  We will need to make sure that our MOOCs offer a range of levels of engagement: browsing, lurking, posting responses and course work, engaging in online discussion with peers and tutors, perhaps getting formal credit eventually (for some). We will need to experiment in order to find out what does work for our kinds of topics  on a very large scale, and what kinds of options we can build in for collaborative learning/working within that context.   We'll need to revisit and test that distinction between "cMOOCs" and "xMOOCs" and take our own thinking further. Watch this space.

The ScHARR MOOC Diaries: Part III - What's it like to be a MOOC Student

Image used under a Creative Commons By Attribution Licence  © Claire Beecroft

Time for a bit of reflective practice, four members of ScHARR have just completed the E-Learning and Digital Cultures MOOC. The course was hosted on the MOOC behemoth Coursera and was facilitated by Jeremy Knox, Siân Bayne, Hamish Macleod, Jen Ross and Christine Sinclair, all from the University of Edinburgh.
The MOOC looked at the contrasting ideas of utopian and dystopian futures and how technology impacts on learning and culture and the concept of what it means to be human in the modern world.
The course was run over five weeks and was a mixture of synchronise content in the form of Google Hangouts by the course tutors reflecting on the previous week’s materials. While most of the content was delivered as asynchronous learning with the idea of students self-directing their learning. This was mostly formed around a core collection of videos and text, with supplementary reading for students wanting to delve deeper into a topic.

The course had over 41,000 students enroll, although evidence seemed to show that about 20% were active participants; active being that they had communicated using one of the various social platforms associated with the course. The majority had some form of higher education background and were based in the U.S or Western Europe. Communication by the course hosts and students was predominantly via Social Media, in particular Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. More formal communication by course leaders and students occurred within the Coursera discussion forums for the EDC MOOC.
After five weeks, students were expected to submit a digital artefact that captured an idea or concept from the course materials. The artefact could be anything from text to video, from images to audio, including such as YouTube and Prezi as dominant mediums of delivery. Each submission was peer-reviewed by three students, although each student had the option to review more than three artefacts. Each ScHARR participant marked four submissions; the marking system was as such:
0 = does not achieve this, or achieves it only minimally
1 = achieves this in part
2 = achieves this fully or almost fully

Students who got a mark higher than 1.5 received a distinction.


Claire Beecroft @beakybeecroft

I really enjoyed the MOOC and it appealed to the way I like to learn - it was largely video-based and the workload was as heavy or light as you wanted it to be. I aimed to do all the ‘core’ activities, but didn’t manage much of the optional stuff, such as participating in forums and blogging, though I did use the Twitter hashtag and found this very useful - one evening while scanning the tweets I noticed a just-tweeted  tweet about a programme starting on BBC4 about ‘Google and the World Brain’- I tuned into iPlayer just as the programme started and watch all 1.5 hours of it - it was so interesting and eye-opening and frankly, worrying. I’d have never heard about it without that tweet.

I was a little surprised at the initial reaction of many students who complained about feeling ‘overwhelmed’ by the volume and diversity of content being generated by the MOOC - we knew that 40,000 had registered, so I wasn’t really surprised at all - I was happy to take a random/scatty approach and to stick to key platforms (mainly Google+ and Twitter) that I use regularly and like.

I would have like to have hung-out at the Hangouts, but these were timed just as I usually start the Friday-night scramble to get to nursery and after-school club before they fine me and call social services.
Although I did watch a little of them on the recording, I think watching live and being able to participate (or at least try to) would have been much more fun.

What I liked the most was that the course really emphasised theoretical perspectives around e-Learning - anyone hoping to learn ‘skills’ would have been disappointed, but that’s not what I need - I wanted to be forced to use my tired, lazy brain- and I was! I also felt they did a good job of hinting and guiding us towards the links between the videos/readings and online learning, but never spelt them out - that was our job and the ‘digital artefact’ task was our chance to provide some proof that we’d gotten our heads around the theme of the MOOC. I also liked the very loose format of the assessed work, and for me the peer-marking system worked well and seemed reasonably fair- having 3 markers gave most of us a fair hearing from our peers I think (but then I got a 2, so I would say that...).

There is lots that we can learn from how they ran their MOOC, from their canny approach in ‘curating’ rather than ‘creating’ content (they didn’t give away any of their own materials as such, just signposted us to existing web-based resources authored or produced by others), to their assessment methods. I also think they were actually pretty brave to stick their head above the parapet and take on a properly Massive, Open and Online Course - the incident at Georgia Tech, just days after the MOOC started, shows just how wrong a MOOC can go, and how immediate and public the consequences can be.

I worked mostly in the evenings, and almost entirely on my new iPad (I had a problem with my iPad-produced Prezi so I fell at the final hurdle of doing the MOOC entirely on it, dang!) and although it was hard to fit it all in, I’ve signed up for 2 more Coursera MOOCs and I’ve got my eye on an edX one too - I just wish the OU would hurry up and launch Futurelearn- something to look forward to...




Chris Blackmore @chrisblackmore
The size of the cohort was an interesting factor - as a learner, I felt rather anonymous, and unconnected to fellow learners. I made very few postings to the discussion forum, and there was little or no sense of community from the forums, in my experience (there was more of a community from the twitter hashtag #edcmooc). This may have been exacerbated by the fact that I wasn’t able to attend the scheduled Google Hangouts. Notably, a group of us set up and attended our own Hangouts to reflect on the course.
The assessment task was to create a digital artefact, which was a wide brief and gave sufficient leeway to create a submission at the last minute! My submission wasn’t as closely related to course materials as it might be, and that was probably a reflection of insufficient time devoted to watching videos and reading texts - I did find it difficult to put in the requisite amount of time to my studies. This is a reflection of the fact that I was primarily doing the MOOC out of curiosity, to see what doing a MOOC felt like, and that I was fitting it in around work and family life.
The peer assessment seemed to work quite well - my own feedback was interesting and informative, and hopefully the feedback I gave was useful. I did find myself being quite generous in my assessments of peers’ submissions.
It was nice to receive confirmation that I had “passed” the MOOC and would receive some kind of official confirmation of this; on reflection, I am not convinced my low level of participation merited a pass, and I presumably wouldn’t have passed a credit-bearing University module with this level of participation. So there are question marks for me on how to monitor the engagement level of students in a valid way and give appropriate feedback and credit.

Angie Rees @angiefelangie
When I signed up for this MOOC it sounded interesting and really relevant to me but I wasn’t at all sure that I had the time for it. However I decided to sign up and see how things went and now I’m very glad I did.

From the first week I liked the format of the course - and the Coursera software it was run in. The format of four weekly videos plus some core and optional reading wasn’t too demanding and the content on the whole was relevant, interesting and often entertaining.

One area of the course which I didn’t make the most of was the social networking side of things. I posted just a few times to twitter, didn’t blog and wasn’t able to make any of the hangouts. I signed up for the facebook page but didn’t really use it. I think this was mainly due to time constraints but also the fact that the huge array of tools people where using to communicate was a bit bewildering and I often didn’t know where to start or what was the ‘right’ place to be participating online. That said within the University we got our own mini network of MOOC-ers going and our online Friday google hangouts where a very useful way of staying connected with at least some of the other participants on the course and getting some sort of feedback and peer comment etc.

I had a huge disaster with the final assignment - I had chosen to do an animation using the online tool Xtranormal. Unfortunately some changes I made to it in the last hour before the deadline failed to render in time and the whole thing was lost. With 12 minutes to go before hand in I frantically created a Prezi using the dialogue from my animation and uploaded it.
The peer comments I received were broadly positive which I was pleased about - especially considering how last-minute the whole thing was. I was delighted to get a distinction but feel it was not quite merited in my case. But hey, I’m not complaining.

My participation in the MOOC was as much about trying out a MOOC as it was about actually learning something - and I think I got a lot out of it on both counts. I’m certainly interested in doing more MOOCs and would love to be involved in designing and teaching one.
The bottom line: a really good learning experience and I would love to do more. 



Andy Tattersall @andy_tattersall
If someone had asked me what to expect from this MOOC in terms of delivery and communication I would have been wide of the mark. I expected there would be an awful lot of communication using Twitter, especially taking into consideration the course material. I certainly didn’t expect that it would be so self driven, and that there would be so many students enrolled. 41,000 is a tremendous number of students, but then again MOOCs are badged as being massive. Even though only a percentage of students were active it still made for a lot of white noise. In amongst all of the Twitter, Google+ and Facebook chatter, there were the discussion forums, which was at times could feel overwhelming if you allowed it to. Add the hundreds of EDC MOOC specific blogs and posts on other blogs it soon became apparent that even the most efficient and time-rich of students would struggle to stay on top of it all.

Nevertheless, conversations did take place and people did respond and retweet some of my communications and thoughts, whilst I found myself Tweeting at fellow students in the live Google Hangouts - these were moments that broke down the non-stop stream of edc consciousness into useful chunks. These moments brought the whole course back to the human/student perspective as we shared ideas and resources. The blog posts were very useful in that some captured the week’s material and ideas in one succinct piece of writing, the only downside is that you were open to ‘Chinese Whispers’ and could misunderstand what was being delivered on the real EDC platform.

The Google Hangouts were very useful as the five course tutors reflected on the previous week in a very informal and friendly manner. It gave a useful dimension to the course in that you got to see and communicate with the course tutors. It lead the four of us in ScHARR - alongside another colleague in Law, Ian Loasby -  to host our own Google Hangouts to chat about the course, and MOOCs in general.

The assessment was interesting, and I really enjoyed creating my digital artefact as it gave me the opportunity to try a new piece of animation software out. I was able to put in experiences and knowledge of my own alongside what I had learned from the MOOC. The artefact took longer than I would have liked, and it was soon evident some students had put greatly varying amounts of time to make their artefact, which again reflects the nature of the course. Unlike a paid for traditional course, there was no obligation to create a large piece of work or any kind of work for that matter, with some creating outstanding artefacts and others not so. The peer review process was interesting and the guidelines to the review process fairly easy to follow, so those who had never assessed academic work were aided somewhat. I was impressed not by what my reviewers had said of my work (although it was mostly very positive) but the standard of the reviewing, I felt like I was being assessed by university teachers.

I found the whole experience a bit of an eye-opener, not just for how the course was run, but how many people participated and how they communicated. From the work I assessed to how I was assessed and how many fellow students I communicated with, I got a real feeling I was studying alongside mostly fellow university staff and students. It left me thinking of the potential of MOOCs as I feel they have yet to breakout beyond the academic firewall, and go far beyond the West geographically. It also had me contemplating the downside of MOOCs, in that the bigger they are, the more potential for noise and a feeling of being overwhelmed. It left me with more questions than answers, but also a feeling of excitement as something great is going to happen. Each MOOC will be different from the next one, to how it is run to how students engage with each other. The range of tools and abilities do not make for a level playing field, but it does allow students to contribute what they like, and that the more you put in the more you should get out, even so you don’t have to feel obliged to put a lot in to get something out - this is no bad thing right now.