My experiences in two MOOCs

I’m involved in two MOOCs right now: the Spanish MOOC and the Learning Creative Learning MOOC.

The purpose of this post is to offer some observations about each of these, particularly as it relates to my previous post on the good, bad, and ugly of MOOCs in general.

I’m further along in the Spanish MOOC, which started in January. I enrolled in this MOOC as an alternative to a college Spanish course I was about to sign up for. I really want to learn Spanish and thought I’d give this a try. I’m spending a lot of time on it (roughly 8-10 hours per week).

Content-wise, I’m finding this course rich and deep, overwhelming even. I believe that the content is more in-depth and more useful than the college course I had looked at. It is mainly video-based with lots of dialogues from native speakers, delivered at native speeds, and a variety of interactive practice opportunities. It’s very challenging for me, but I think I’m learning something.

At the start of this course, there were about 4,000 people enrolled. To me, there could be 40,000 or 4, and I wouldn’t know the difference. I mostly go through all the content independently and have not real interaction with others. It is basically an online correspondence course, albeit one that is free and high quality.

There is a “peer learning” aspect of the course that consists of weekly G+ hangouts of students doing oral language activities together. I went to one. There were a half dozen people in the one I attended, most all of whom had some prior experience with Spanish. I felt (a) not able to participate much as a complete beginner and (b) not getting much help, since there were no real Spanish speakers there. I guess I didn’t find that beginning foreign language study is really a fruitful area for peer learning. (That could just be me though. I have a lot of anxiety and frustration affect with this particular area of study.)

Like I said, I think I’m learning though. (I live near the border and in just a few weeks have already found that I can pick out some words and phrases in native conversations.) Does the fact that this is a MOOC have an influence on that? Probably not. Like I said, it seems to be an effective learning experience though.

As it relates to the MOOC discussion, this course is massive and, in some senses, open. (Enrollment was available to anyone, but the content is not open licensed.) It offers some innovation in that it is using new, adaptive software that does seem to individualize the experience. It allows a high degree of self-direction and self-pacing, as well, of course, as anywhere, anytime access.

The Learning Creative Learning MOOC is being offered by MIT Media Lab and P2PU. It consists primarily of pretty typical college course content: weekly readings, video lectures, and opportunities to engage in hands-on projects and explorations.

It’s just started, so it’s hard to conclude much at this point. What’s interesting to me about this MOOC is how they’re attempting to incorporate peer learning and community. At the onset, participants were grouped in sub-groups. (There were about 24,000 enrolled at the beginning.) Each group gets an email each week, and you can communicate with your group by replying to that email. But we don’t know who is in our group or how many people are in it. (This is, in part, the “mechanical MOOC” model you have have heard about.)

Each group was invited to make a G+ community for itself. (There is also a whole course G+ community, but I find it too large to be meaningful.) Everyone’s also been invited to form new groups, switch groups, or do whatever they want to make this work.

I like peer learning, and I like P2PU, so the first thing I did was to set up a P2PU Learning Creative Learning group. I was hoping to foster some interesting discussions and collaborations around this content there.

It’s too early to say, but so far there hasn’t been much action there. A couple people who I’m already friends with (and who are in my group, as well) are in it. A handful of others have joined as well. No one has participated much yet. (I have several ideas about why this might be, but I’m going to give it more time to see.)

What I can say is that, unlike Spanish, I think this content is ideally suited to peer learning, and right now I’m feeling a little lonely.

Well, time to stop writing and start MOOC’ing if I’m going to keep up with all this stuff! I’ll write more as these MOOCs move along.