MOOCs: the platform question

In doing some thinking about planning and setting up connectivist MOOCs, the first question that often comes up is “What platform should we use?”

To answer that question, like many other design questions, one should first think about the goals of the task at hand, in this case, the goals of your MOOC.

For #clmooc and other connectivist MOOCs, our goals were centered around connected learning and creating a learner-centered, participatory environment. We also had a stated goal of being open in the broadest sense possible. Clearly articulating those values was critical to choosing a platform.

For #clmooc, we chose to go with multiple platforms. Our main two platforms were WordPress and G+. We also used and supported Twitter and a blog hub. Finally, we built in flexibility to use different platforms as we went and to let the community determine which platforms would be primary.

Overwhelmingly, our participants selected G+ as their platform of choice for this MOOC.

Here is a short summary of how we used each platform and the pros and cons of each .

Platform Use in #clmooc Pros Cons
WordPress
  • Central participant registration
  • Site for facilitator blog posts and announcements
  • Site for about page, FAQs, help guides, calendar, links to other platforms
  • Way we sent email newsletters (Wysija)

 
  • One central location
  • Easy for multiple developer/facilitators to manage
  • Highly customizable
  • Strong support community
  • Control of license (open CC BY in our case)

 
  • Not very interactive
  • Email open rate was low (as is typical)
G+
  • Main location for participant posting and group interaction
  • High use
  • Very interactive and social
  • Very easy to use
  • Nearly everyone has a Google acct. so barriers to participate were low
  • Open in the sense of publicly viewable
  • Proprietary platform; not open licensed
  • Subject to Google’s whims
  • Hard to find old posts
  • Not easy to track analytics
  • No tie to other platforms
Blog hub
  • Place where we aggregated participants’ blogs if they submitted them
  • Allows much longer format reflections
  • Participant-driven and owned
  • Not everyone has a blog; not easy to set up
  • Requires bigger time commitment by participants
  • Lower use
Twitter
  • Weekly Twitter chats
  • Sporadic #clmooc discussions
  • Immediate
  • Very interactive and social
  • Open in the sense of publicly viewable
  • Small % of people are on Twitter
  • Proprietary platform; not open licensed
  • Subject to Twitter’s whims (less of a concern because it’s well established)

 

The tools #clmooc used were obviously all publicly available tools. Other platform choices that some might entertain (and why we didn’t) include:

  • Closed proprietary platforms like Blackboard, Coursesites, etc. – We felt that an open, participatory platform was integral to our mission and goals.
  • Custom-developed platforms – We didn’t have the budget or support resources for this.
  • Newer MOOC specific platforms like Google’s Coursebuilder, OpenMOOC, or edX – We didn’t have the time, staff, or expertise to learn and troubleshoot a new platform.

The bottom line is that what platform you choose really matters. In hindsight, I think the choice to go with multiple platforms was the right one for #clmooc, and we were happy with the platforms we chose. They weren’t without problems (such as the virtual impossibility of gathering and correlating analytics across platforms), but they served our goals. And most importantly, they served our participants.

Kids’ Maker Day

(cross-posted from Mobile Musings)

Inspired by the #maker movement, #clmooc, and others, I put together a local kids’ maker day this weekend.

making puppets and jewelry
making puppets and jewelry

This was a part of our local Heritage Days event, for which I’ve been helping coordinate a kids’ activity day for a few years.

The day was a great success. We had over twice the attendance we’ve had in past years (and this is in an extremely rural area), and the kids had a great time, as did Brad and I.

In part, I’d attribute the success to an open approach of letting kids decide what approach they wanted to take for each maker project (or even to decide to do other projects), being flexible about the schedule, allowing kids to work on things of their choice, and emphasizing self-directed learning and fun over everything else.

Lessons learned:

  • Making is great! It’s educational and fun, and something a lot of kids don’t get to do enough of. (In the past, we’d done more presentations. None of those this year, and no one missed them.)
  • Our general approach of loose, open, flexible, and let the kids guide things was perfect!
  • Mixed ages work great. We asked for kids older than 4 (but had a couple younger) and set no upper age limit. We had kids from 2-19, and it worked great.
  • We were happy to partner with an existing event. This was good for our event and the partner event and worked well for parents too.
  • Market, market, market. You have to get the word out to attract people. Having done this for a few consecutive years helped too.

Planned activity list:

  • Welcome and Introductions
  • Make your name tag
  • Make photos * Bring your own camera or use one of ours! (See notes on the photo challenge from last year here; this was the only activity from a previous year that we repeated. We were glad we did because one kid said “I begged to come just so I could do this!”)
  • BREAK
  • Make a mask
  • Yoga for kids
  • LUNCH ON SITE
  • Cardboard turtle races
  • Make a snack (smoothies)
  • BREAK
  • Make a puppet
  • Make jewelry
  • Wrap-Up

Supply list:

(Note: I don’t think I spent $25 on this outside of stuff I already had.)

  • paper plates
  • paper bags
  • cardboard
  • paper
  • egg cartons
  • cardboard tubes
  • tongue depressors/popsicle sticks
  • toothpicks
  • lots of crayons, markers, colored pencils, pencils
  • scissors
  • glue
  • glitter
  • stretchy cord
  • beads
  • buttons
  • old socks
  • scraps of old fabric
  • blenders
  • smoothie makings (frozen and fresh fruit, yogurt, milk, juice, water, wheat germ, flax)
  • spoons
  • cups
  • library books for inspiration

Anecdotes:

  • Models – At the beginning, we showed kids all the supplies we had and told them what we’d be doing. We also put out a bunch of books with ideas of what kinds of things (masks, puppets, jewelry) they might make. We didn’t supply any step-by-step instructions. From there, kids took it and ran. They came up with things we’d never have thought of.
  • Photo challenge – Kids just loved this. This year we also let them write their own challenges and share them, which was fun.
  • Nothing we planned – One kid made a diorama of an Indian village. This was nothing we’d planned, mentioned, or even contemplated someone making.
    diorama of an Indian village (and stegosaurus mask)
    Diorama of an Indian village (and triceratops mask)
  • Peer mentoring – With kids of all ages, peer mentoring was natural,and we gave no instructions or guidance on this. There was one college-aged youth who came ostensibly to oversee her younger siblings. She started the day reading in the corner. By the end of the day, she was teaching all of us how to make sock puppets and jewelry.
  • Design – This is a sketch of a marionette puppet plan. Design thinking was happening even though we didn’t prompt it.
    IMG_6160

more pictures here

All photos in this post copyrighted “All rights reserved.”

Reclaiming the MOOC name

I have heard a lot of poo-pooing of MOOCs. A lot of “we-are-not-going-to-get-on-this-bandwagon” talk. A lot of “we don’t want no stinking MOOCs.”

credit: Audrey Watters (I think)

I can only assume that what people are reacting to is the new breed of xMOOCs from the Courseras and Udacities (that’s funny, huh?) of the world. These are MOOCs that strive to serve hundreds of thousands of learners; that have weak facilitation, little peer interaction, and not much collaboration; that focus on analytics and big data and have business models that are troubling; that are often neither open, nor transparent.

But this isn’t what MOOCs are about to me. To me, they should be open, transparent, connected, and collaborative. That was the vision of the original idea of MOOCs, the cMOOCs as they are now called.

So when will we reclaim the MOOC name for this kind of collaboration that we value? Let’s not let the corporate MOOC armies take this term and co-opt it.