ocTEL has been up and running for over a week now. After a start where the momentum of the email discussion threatened to run away with itself, Stephen Downes, who is a ‘critical friend’ on the project, shared his advice to OcTEL. We’ve taken that advice to heart and this post outlines how we’ve sought to embrace his suggestions.
Stephen advises:
- set up a system whereby you are sending out one email a day to people
- in this email, put your course announcements at the top
- also put a link to the mailing list archives, or (even better) links to the current topics on the board archives
… you can use this system to incorporate ‘publish in your own space’ responses
- create a mechanism to allow people to register their blogs
- set up an aggregator of participant blogs
- include the aggregator listings in the once-a-day email
Additionally
- aggregate the Twitter posts for the course tag (I forget what it was; I’m sure it’s in an email somewhere)
- aggregate from the diigo group – https://groups.diigo.com/group/alt-octel
- list these posts in your once-a-day email
One email a day: the Daily Newsletter
When creating the ocTEL platform we were conscious of the need to push information to participants in a timely and useful way. From day one we had included the MailPress plugin for WordPress for distributing a daily and weekly newsletter. Below is a screenshot of the newsletter from day one sent on the 4th April. Other than there not being much content (it was day one) we recognised there were a number of areas to improve.
Using some earlier work we’ve developed a custom ocTEL template (available here along with other source code from the project). The image to the right (which you can click to enlarge) gives you an overview of a recent version of the newsletter, which you can view online here.
Put your course announcements at the top, plus links to the current topics on the board archives…incorporate ‘publish in your own space’ responses
The newsletter currently contains five sections:
- Course information – displays any full post made by the course team tagged ‘course information’.
- Recent activity – is used to summaries new aggregated content from the course reader
- Forum activity – currently configured to display the last 5 recent topics and recent replies
- Participant blogs – excerpts from participant blogs
- Bookmarks – a summary of bookmarks from delicious and diigo tagged ocTEL
As the course evolves our plan is to refine the newsletter to maximise effectiveness. This will be in part to respond to the dynamics of the course, but also to experiment with different configurations and features. If you have any suggestions for these we’ve created a topic on the forum or contact us by any other means that you prefer.
Create a mechanism to allow people to register their blogs, aggregate them and include in daily email
The ‘publish in your own space’ (or wherever you prefer) principle is at the core of our platform design and has directly influenced a number of our fundamental decisions including the adoption of WordPress. As part of the registration form we asked participants to include a link to their existing blog and these were imported into our platform from the start, after which participants could login to review and edit their details — as shown in the video below. This includes selecting an RSS feed so that we can aggregated their posts into our site allowing other participants to review content via the Course Reader or as part of the daily newsletter.
Like a number of other open online courses we achieve this by using the FeedWordPress plugin for WordPress which has the ability to aggregate RSS data. In addition to this we recently developed the ability for participants to submit additional artefacts not accessible using RSS.
Aggregate from the diigo group
As well as collection of data from participant feeds we are aggregating other feeds. These include the ocTEL JISCMail list, the Diigo group, Delicious bookmarks tagged ocTEL and others. Even though the course has been running a relatively short time, it’s encouraging to see individuals establishing new places for participants to cluster. As these are created, and where possible, we are adding them to the list of aggregated feeds. This currently includes the Google+ Community created by David Read and a Mendeley Group created by Ann Nortcliffe.
Aggregate the Twitter posts for the course tag
Currently we are only aggregating a selection of tweets into the Course Reader using the search term ‘#ocTEL AND ?’ giving us a sub-selection of tweets which might be questions. Using a system developed for another open online course we attempt to match questions with answers. These are available in the Course Reader and in this dedicated page.
It is also worth highlighting that we are archiving all the course tweets using a Google Spreadsheet template. In an attempt to provide a way for participants to navigate and explore this data we have another dedicated page with a ‘conversation graph’.
Cease sending out mailing list emails, give people a few days to catch their breath
This was the one element of Stephen’s advice we haven’t yet followed. We trusted ocTEL participants to self-regulate and catch their breath of their own accord, and happily they did. We know that email discussion lists have the capacity to flare up suddenly, and that may happen again. However, our parent organisation ALT successfully runs an email list with a thousand members, and, at present, ocTEL’s list of just under 800 participants is going through a quiet phase.
To conclude
When launching this course for the first time, we wondered what decisions would look daft with hindsight. Now I think we know at least one such decision. We have made changes quickly where we could, while still operating within our original principles. I hope this post highlights in a number of other areas we are not only on top of the problem but proactive in developing and sharing new solutions to help others who might be interested in delivering their own open online courses. I hope it also illustrates that we are trying to respond to the needs of our participants and we welcome any suggestions you have to improve the course (you are free to choose how to submit these for example the forum, email or other…)
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.
I think you’re doing a great job, Octel team. I’ve been collecting things that work or don’t work for me, so here you go:
Thumbs up:
Really helpful posts from tutors and users to assist with orientation.
The daily digest is good for a sense of the activity of others and to keep in touch with the course organisers’ activity.
Martin’s course reader
It’s great that that many of the OcTEL activities aren’t password protected – I had no access to a login for most of one week yet I was still able to use the links and recordings.
Pleased to see clearly the duration of all course resource to help time planning – Excellent use of Youtube markers.
For others who want to do this it’s explained here: http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/2011/07/jumping-directly-to-a-youtube-segment.html
Good webinar facilitation especially use of the smiley faces to check audio is working ok, and thanks David for showing how to change the layout.
Thumbs down
The course content links should open new browser tabs so you can multitask e.g. a lot of videos are really audios so you can listen to one resource while browsing another text resource.
Recordings need to go up fast – not everyone can live attend the webinar but unless they catch up quickly the dropout rot sets in…
Really annoying that the chat in Elluminate does not word-wrap so you have to keep scrolling it sideways.
The course reader needs to indicate what you’ve already looked at better e.g. use mauve “visited link” colour
This forum is hard to navigate (constant redisplay of the original post, removal of paragraph breaks, difficulty moving forward and back through threads).
Found it hard to use the first webinar because of a 1 hour 47 minute unnecessary preamble before the start that could have been edited out? Also it would be great if the webinar recordings could be YouTube as I cannot access them from behind the work firewall and Elluminate is desperately slow.
Secure passwords are a mistake (but integral to WordPress) – they are an absolute nuisance and a big entry barrier. More info on resetting them during the orientation.
Gravatar. Very confusing website. Don’t like it using same image on different websites. Prefer to directly upload one that is relevant to the platform…
Wishlist
I’d like to have a rogue’s gallery of mugshots with twitter-style brief descriptions of the active course members. That would help.
I’d like even clearer understanding of what materials (e.g. the course materials not just the forum posts) are proving popular because of the lack of time I have to keep up. And to be able to vote up/vote down.
Thank you again for all the hard work. I’m finding this the best MOOC I’ve done so far!
Hi Imogen,
Not quite a twitter rouges gallery but we do now have a ‘top contributors’ page so that you can see the top 20 most active participants adding stuff to the course reader and forums http://octel.alt.ac.uk/course-discussions/top-contributors/
> I’d like to have a rogue’s gallery of mugshots with twitter-style brief descriptions of the active course members.
The way this comment is phrased makes me think of doing the introductory messages “Hello, my name is Stephen and I joined the course because…” in week three, not first thing week one.
Just thinking out loud…
Hi Imogen,
Thanks a million for taking the time to provide this detailed feedback. I’m glad to see there were a few ‘thumbs up’ points, but naturally we take the ‘thumbs down’ points especially seriously. So, after some consultation with my colleagues, here our our responses to each one.
We could do this (though opening in a new tab is also under individual user control using a combination of mouse and keyboard inputs). Should this only be done where the linked resources can be listened to without viewing? e.g. should the readiness questionnaires in the current week also open in a new tab, even though you would then have to navigate to the the new tab to complete them?
In the Course Reader, if you click on the button on the top right of the reader (a diag arrow pointing up to the right) then the item concerned opens in a new window.
We aim to have them up within four hours of completion. Sometimes other demands may prevent us from achieving this aim.
This is also under user control. If you have unlocked the layout, you should be able to drag out the bottom corner of the chat window so it is wider and sentences do not wrap (actual wrap behaviour depends on client software, not some central setting, so we cannot fix this).
Not sure exactly what is meant here. The posts that you’ve read should show a distinctly different shade (white rather than grey) on most browsers. However the Course Reader will only remember this from session to session if you are logged in. Are you not seeing the difference, or are you asking about something different?
We’re aware of some usability problems with the forums and keen to get a consensus about improvements we could make. There is the beginnings of a discussion on the Help forum at http://octel.alt.ac.uk/forums/topic/changing-the-order-most-recent-first-of-posts-to-small-groups/ and we’d welcome further input, ideally with examples (e.g. where and how, exactly, is it difficult to move through threads?)
The removal of paragraph breaks is a common problem in WordPress, I’m afraid, which we’ve tried to mitigate using stylesheets, but this is only a partial solution.
The first point was a glitch, sorry. In terms of putting the webinars on YouTube, we understand the advantages of this but regret that we do not have the means and resources necessary to do this at present. (Even Blackboard’s own webinar videos do not capture the full experience, including chat and other activities, very well http://www.youtube.com/user/BlackboardTV )
Both these points were initially forced by our selection of WordPress as a platform. They are on our list of things we feel we could do better. So, yes, we aim to address them, but I can’t give you a definite date for this yet.
Thanks, we will give these priority over our own internal wishlist. In terms of the first one, I’d be interested to hear what you think of Stephen’s idea above?
We do have a means of ‘voting up’ by favouriting contributions on the Course Reader (use the star next to the item, or view the screencast for a demonstration). We plan to publicise and encourage more favouriting in the coming weeks, and generally finding new and better ways to highlight popular content is an issue that we hope to address later in this run of the course.