[rldly]

I posted intro and big question earlier in this forum.  Have had a manic week and never got back to my small group reflection.  Have been trying to catch up on reading and writing this morning so here goes….

Activity 2
What characteristics do you think the participants in this course have in common?
In what ways might they be different or atypical of other groups of learners that might be important or relevant to you?

Curiosity about TEL
Interest
Motivation

Differences:   I like the idea of a MOOC for a professional learning network but do not have a great deal of interest exploring conceptual basis of MOOCs as not relevant to my current professional working context.  I guess I am operating at a more mundane level, trying to integrate/embed technology and the opportunities it can offer within everyday teaching practice.  A bit more about this below.

Activity 3 forms of communication – jiscmail; twitter; blog
What forms of reflection, challenge and learning do each of these do best?
How do they support relationship forming and community building? Is that important for learning?  Which do you prefer and why?

Twitter – very difficult to compose short phrases that accurately encompass thoughts; positives = informal; freedom to be yourself; randomness can generate something very useful.  Also it is so easy to keep up to date on what is going on by following fellow professionals – my preferred MOOC is twitter – confused now:(
Blog:  reflective; makes you think; also can be informal; takes time to compose (for me)
JISCmail: more like email most common form of communication for me.  I am most comfortable with what I use most frequently – familiarity and ease of use (rules in Outlook keep it organised) are main reasons.

Activity 4
Interesting examples of TEL – see online resources

Activity 5 Small group reflection: (Apologies not small group – just mine; will try harder next time)

There is a very wide range of experience amongst participants – primarily appears to be academics/academic developers looking for ideas, support, information around TEL.  I am already familiar with a lot of the resources referenced in Activity 4 and think newcomers might be a bit overwhelmed by the scale of the resources provided as there is a lot reading and new ideas to grapple with, even though of course no-one has to do it.

What challenges does this present for the course?

Challenges for the MOOC are that perhaps people who are at different stages in terms of immersion/engagement with TEL might lose interest and drop out if they are not getting stimulated by the ideas/information/challenges they are finding in ocTEL.  Figuring out how to let some of the communciations just go by is also a challenge as there can be a tendency to try and cover everything thus drowning slowly in information.

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

I just attended the ocTEL webinar.  I was surprised to find the  focus on concept of MOOCs and opportunities for scalability through innovation in learning design.  I am always wary of TEL being automatically linked by default to online learning, and recently nearly always to MOOCs.  Seems every meeting or discussion I have about TEL these days always ends up being about MOOCs and that is not something that I have any great concern with because it isn’t relevant to my professional context just now.  For example.  I am interested in using technology to explore alternative forms of assessment rather than yet another 3000 word written assignment.  We have about 50 flip cameras available in the School which are basic = simple to use and pretty old technology now, but still working!  We use them very regularly for group assessments with a variety of process and product assessments and the students love it from undergrad to graduate level.  Nothing to do with online and nothing to do with a MOOC but to me the essence of what I should be doing – appropriately applying technology to transform teaching and learning.  It is all fairly simple but at my level has had a very positive impact.

So why am I here in a MOOC ?  Because I need to connect with other people; explore professional experience from other perspectives, engage with and in a community of learning to explore alternative methods and process where technology is appropriately applied to transform teaching and learning.

My previous experience of a MOOC was interesting but not good from a number of perspectives.  It was a lonely online learning space; brief recorded lectures; small number of mcq’s and difficult, long weekly assessments.  The discussion boards were quite intimidating with the amount of negativity and general brusqueness in forum posts  – lots of negative comments about support (or lack of), difficulty following threads,  interspersed with demands for answers to questions.  The tutor support also seemed disconnected in that frequently what was posted did not seem to respond to any particular issue/concern/question.  I did not get any sense of connected learning (although a number of students frequently posted as close to a solution to weekly assignments as they could before the posts were removed by moderators)  or working together to solve problems. I felt there were huge gaps in what I was learning.  I could complete a piece of programming code and get it to work and get full marks.  But I did not really understand the logic behind what I was doing, it was a mechanical exercise and there was nowhere to go to get the kind of answer i needed due to the nature of the communication in the forums.  It was a bit intimidating so I dropped out thinking life was too short for that level of stress in a voluntary activity.

I did find it very interesting reading posts in that MOOC and trying to understand how and why people were responding in this way to a free online course that they had voluntarily engaged with.  I never figured out the answer but I could see elements of the same kind of tensions rising for a while during the first week of this MOOC.  It does seem to have settled now and I am enjoying reading the daily digests and already looking forward to next week.

Sorry this post is soooooo long.  Will really try and get organised next time for a proper group reflection.

[rldly]

I think this is the level as which I work with academic staff – doing simple things to try and change course material.  Instead of recording a 1 hour lecture to be posted in Blackboard; divide the content into short ‘topic’ chunks; record a series of shorter presentations interspersed with learning activities e.g. pause recording to review a section of an article relevant to the topic being discussed; consider a question which is returned to in the next recording; watch a relevant YouTube video;  answer a couple of formative mcq’s.

[rldly]

Hi everyone,

I would like to join in for the small group discussion if that is okay.  I work in a School of Nursing and work with academic staff on the development of blended learning programmes from the existing offerings within the School.  We are in our third year now with some fully online certificates, diplomas and core Masters modules now online using variety of technological tools.

Thanks,

Orla

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