Hopefully now you now feel confident about finding the places, people and opportunities within ocTEL that might best support your learning. With so much activity going on across channels, one of our challenges is providing ways for you to find your way in this broad landscape, highlighting and directing you to clusters of activity that might be useful to you. As the course evolves we are trying to respond to your needs so in this post I wanted to signpost some places you might not have been aware of which will allow you to make new connections.
Participant blogs & discussion spaces
One of the great things to happen in the course early on was the creation by participants of their own shared spaces. In the participant blogs & discussion spaces page we’ve list the ones we know about and if you have anymore you’d like to share please let us know. We thought it would also be useful to list participant blogs. This is very basic for now and we are adding features on demand (for example originally the list didn’t include profile links).
Top contributors
Following a request from imogenbertin on a recent post we’ve started to develop a top contributors page. This lists the community members (top 20) who have generated the most content for the Course Reader, Forums and Twitter archive. We’re again interested in your views about this page and how it might be improved.
It’s important to emphasise that this should not be taken ay any kind of pecking order of ocTEL participants. In parallel with this, and possibly more importantly, we are working hard to support people making their first few posts.
Course Reader Favourites
A feature that appears to have been missed by most people is the ability to ‘favourite’ posts in the Course Reader. If you spot a post you like we encourage you to give it a star by clicking on the icon. The sidebar in the Course Reader lists the posts with the most ‘favourites’ and a list of posts you’ve added a favourite to.
Daily Newsletter
The Daily Newsletter is a great way to get a summary of activity in your inbox. If you are not getting this check your ‘Manage Newsletter Subscriptions’ link from your [edit_profile_link text=’Edit Profile’] page or check your email spam folder.
Twitter Retweets
If you are looking for the tweets that have resonated the most in the last 24 hours (in terms of retweets), there is the Twitter (Retweets) page.
Let us know if you have any other suggestions for surfacing interesting content and people.
Martin Hawksey is Chief Innovation, Technology and Community Officer for ALT his work is focused on the development of ALT’s member services exploring how connectivist approaches can be used to support the community. This includes the application of data aggregation and dissemination techniques using existing open source platforms such as WordPress.
Thanks for doing the “rogue’s gallery”, Martin and for pointing out the favouriting that I’d missed!
The number of ways of finding stuff on this MOOC is mind-boggling… great job.
What’s your own data mining experience on the lurkers/posters ratio for this course, and perhaps for other online courses?
I’ve been scratching my head over why ‘favouriting’ in the Course Reader hasn’t been used. Part of the issue is perhaps it only works in the Reader. It would be interesting if I could incorporate it in the Newsletter which is often where I see things I want to star.
The lurker/poster issue is interesting. As we have a truly open course (login only required to post) someone could be in an auditing/lurker mode and there’s no way for us to know (other than anonymised webstats). There is still more work to do in utilising the stats we do collect. The evolution continues… 😉