[Niall Barr]

We’re supposed to see if we can arrive at a shared view on:

What can we tell about the range of experiences and preferences among ocTEL participants?
What challenges does this present for the course?

In what ways is a MOOC well or poorly suited to these challenges?

So here’s my initial thoughts…

A very wide range, though generally quite a lot of experience of either using or supporting users of technology in teaching.
The participants/pupils know more than the organisers/teachers… Really it has to be more of a guided discussion.

How rigid is the definition of a MOOC? Is codeproject.com, where lots of expert and inexpert programmers exchange hints, chat about both relevant and irrelevant things and publish example code and peer reviewed tutorials a MOOC?

One thing with this one is that the huge volume of discussion means that many participants are unlikely to see the best bits. Maybe it needs a voting systems (like facebook ‘likes’) to make the best comments more visible.

[Niall Barr]

Yes, good points. I think the way most lecturers at Glasgow use Moodle as a fairly low key support resource for traditional teaching is perfectly acceptable, however it’s certainly not making full use of the facility, and doesn’t give us a model for distance (or flexible) education.

I agree that it’s probably a good idea for lecturing staff to experience an online course before writing one, but I think people like us need to guide them in the right direction – I’d hate to be trying to convince a non-geek lecturer to get more involved after they’d experienced something like the e-mail torrent of day one of this MOOC.

Technology choices for students is an interesting one…  I like to be as unprescriptive as possible – but we still get occasional support requests from students using unidentified ancient versions of IE on Windows 98, and it’s really quite limiting if we try and support that!

[Niall Barr]

Hi Joan and John,

Since this group is more relevant to me than most, and also nice and small, I’d like to join. (I’ve been finding the volume of text in the e-mail digest overwellming,

I think you both know me, but for others, I work in in the Learning Technology Unit at the University of Glasgow, and am also involved with interoperability specification development with IMS Global.

I’m interested in the technology behind learning and teaching, both on-campus and distance. I suspect that one of our big challenges over the next few years is going to be improving the way we support students mixing distance, local-but-not-present and on-campus learning.

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