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ed3d (Peter) replied to the topic in the forum 11 years, 6 months ago
I agree to some extent about the misguided comparison — it occurred to me later. I guess my main point was that open source advocacy on a closed source platform, viz Collaborate, was a little “odd”.
I don’t think we have the data to make judgements about viability of OpenSim as a platform for a MOOC. As far as cognitive load is concerned, my experience with students is that they’re operational in about 30 min, less if you stop them fiddling with appearance — Leicester say much the same. Obviously it depends on what you want them to do and you streamline the environment to simplify/focus the experience. Of course, the platform doesn’t suit everyone or everything but you work with the affordances at hand.
As far as this MOOC is concerned, we have 6 online on the main site as I type and there were ~60 for the webinar today. Not really scary numbers.
As far as accessibility is concerned — it actually simplifies design decisions in a rather helpful way. The Radegast viewer helps too as I’m sure you know.
More generally I think there’s a danger that one buys into the text-based, mega-MOOC groupthink unquestioningly. That’s all I was trying to say really.
Collaborate does pose that dilemma for many of us on the OS spectrum but it does seem to be more fit for purpose than BIgBlueButton for example.
I agree that the current numbers on octel might be fine on OpenSim but not the numbers we had at the outset.
I would also come back to the asynchronous nature of our interaction on octel (or any mooc) – I am not sure that would work terribly well on OpenSim or another similar platform. But you may have ideas on that. I note the MA in VWs at UWE, with which I had limited contact earlier this year, still uses Blackboard though maybe that’s not a fair comparison.