Making MOOCs

Supporting informal communities in formal education

Online study groups, social & welfare issues for students, support, discipline, research & special interest groups, communities, professional development skills, within formal education.

Open research tool

Provides rich ground for research into issues that are local but globally connected.
Asking questions, big conversations
Enables massive dissemination of research findings and continues the conversation.
Consider the ethics of how you collect data. Make participants aware of how survey data will be used.
Consider publishing in open journals.

Community engagement strategy

Areas where disciplines collide (e.g. art & science), non-traditional multi-disciplinary adventures, issues with immediate relevance to the local and global community (e.g health, environment, urban planning). Activism.

Making a difference

Taking an approach that asks participants to “do something” to connect to people and causes – community activism at a local level, and awareness of how this links to global issues.
Citizens, digital citizens

Pathways to and from educational institutions

Provides a “taster” of a subject domain, links to careers, research, communicate real-world-relevance, connect  academic to open disciplines. Open education, DIY education

Resource building

Could be a space to openly collaborate to create a new resources. e.g. manual, planning, documentation.

Partnership space

Provides a strategic shared space for attracting and partnering with industry, organisations and individuals around matters of common interest
Provides an accessible shared space for universities to work cross-institutionally around research, projects and teaching and learning activities

Department support

If your project aligns with departmental priorities there may be funding or in-kind support available. Include supervisors, managers, directors in your support framework.

Learning design and teaching support teams

Learning, or educational design advice on structuring online learning activities, exploring pedagogies and approaches,  web tools, research and evaluation.

Technical support

Support for setting up website, social media accounts, , videos, embedding media, backing up, troubleshooting participant problems and also as a ‘site admin’.

In-kind library assistance

Subject liaison librarians can support finding of sharable open access resources, including open access journals and copyright advice.

Subject experts

2 or 3 academic subject experts, which could include external industry experts who are comfortable or experienced with the implications of teaching in an open space. Guest lecturers.

Grant funding

A research proposal and/or grant funding wrapped around MOOC development  may be an effective way to justify and resource academic and professional staff time.

Project approach

Provides the structure to pull in resources as needed, establishes a cohesive group energy in moving forward, opportunity to formalise and recognise all contributors.

A.

Curriculum is defined and clear learning objectives and criteria for success

Fits with formal education approach, can work for a MOOC but consider the extreme diversity of your audience (global, various backgrounds, beginners & experts) to ensure some flexibility.

B.

Interest area is broadly conceived

Have a set of broad objectives, encourage participants to self-set goals. Good for introductory levels to subjects.

C.

Participants identify area of interest

Before writing objectives of course, use survey instruments to collect feedback about what potential participants want to achieve/learn.

A.

Participant/peer driven

Letting participants choose their level of engagement, what they do and how they do it.

B.

Responsive design

Reacting on-the-fly to participant feedback and input to tailor the activities to the unique cohort.

C.

Problem-based / challenges

Presenting challenges, invoking any level of competition, encouraging group work, game-based activities.

D.

Discovery model

Exploring as cohorts, beginning with questions instead of presenting materials/information.

E.

Scaffolded activity

Having points of support, tips, suggestions, exemplars, open discussion about ideas for completing activities.

F.

Prescribed activity

Defining each activity clearly, with specific instructions

A.

Distributed open platform

A freely available online space that has a collection tools and usually a directory of sites that can be used. Third party tools (e.g. social media, image hosting, document hosting) are partly or fully integrated, or can be linked embedded. Sometimes has open source code, and could be self-hosted, but often provides free useable hosting of basic pages, with media, documents, images hosted in third party applications. Evaluation and data needs to be gathered by own efforts, technical support may be available but informal.

B.

Fully distributed (platformless)

Uses entirely separate freely available tools, that you can link together to create a bespoke online space to suit your requirements.  This has the advantage of great flexibility, but can be difficult if participants are required to register/sign up onto various tools. Set up could be time consuming and ongoing support, including technical needs to be factored into the resources needed.

D.

Hosted complete platform

Aimed at having everything in one place, this is most like a learning management system used in formal online education. Can still link/embed some third party tools. May not be completely open or have full control and may require formal agreements to access. Advantage is access to data in terms of participant activity, ease of supporting participants to do things as all using the same toolset.

E.

Commercial partnership

Some MOOC platforms can be accessed through a formal partnership. These have the same attributes as a hosted complete platform, but the partnership may include an element of development and technical support as well as evaluation. You may require funding to be involved if costs fall outside available budget.

A.

Linking to resource collections

Look for repositories, collections of open resources in your subject area.

B.

Linking to specific resources

Direct links to key singular resources on external platforms that you are familiar with in your subject area that form the basis of participant activity or facilitator input. Consider how broadly relevant these are to a global audience.

C.

Embedded resources

Making resources available as part of your central core of content, downloadable collections.

D.

Peer-created materials

Use your MOOC as a publishing space, collecting participant-create resources or linking to where these resources have been created.

E.

Self-produced resources

These could be documents, video, audio, art, games, executable programs, apps that are specifically produced for the MOOC. Some of these formats are time consuming to 

A.

Informal promotions

Word of mouth, personal & professional conversations,  colleagues in other geographical areas

B.

Use of social media

Promoting in existing online communities in related subject areas, asking influential individuals to share through social networks, use of hashtags, keywords.

C.

Promotions via platform host

Many open MOOC platforms have a site directory, and there are independent lists of MOOCs, many of which are free to list with.

D.

Industry and public marketing

Industry and government intranets and mailing lists, newsletters, community publications and noticeboards - these are often free.

E.

Formal marketing support

Newspapers, radio, formal support from marketing team, use of paid online promotional tools, advertisements.

A.

Flexible participation  

Open-enrolment and no expectation that participants will engage with every activity or resource.  Participants can choose whether to work to schedule or make their own schedule. Encouraged to self-direct how they interact.

B.

Live facilitation

Scheduled times when facilitator is available for synchronous sessions.

C.

Self-paced

Participants decide on pace of progression, ability to self-check own progression.

D.

Structured cohorts  and groups

Enrolment period specified and closed off. Structure built into MOOC to support group-based cohorts for specific activities or time-based progression. Can be difficult to administrate groups on open platforms due to large number of participants.

E.

Monitored discussions

Facilitation of asynchronous discussion forums by content experts and technical admin to address problems, encourage discussion and interject to steer questions and suggest resources.

F.

Responsive facilitation

Facilitation based on gauging demand from the cohort, providing mechanism for community vote on level of facilitation, being available for asynchronous session

G.

Participant-led partnerships and small groups

Could provide participant choice on forming partnerships and small groups to work on specific activities and give participants responsibility of self-managing group interactions with tools of their choice.

A.

Peer to peer support

The large participant numbers mean that encouraging peer support in discussion forums and social media can be a useful way of managing a large community. Actively promoting a self-supporting community provides participants with an opportunity to learn and connect with each other.  This can be a useful way to address technical support questions, by having the user community available to suggest help with these questions.

B.

Common issues addressed (FAQs etc)

These can be anticipated while you are developing the course, but look around at other MOOC FAQs.  Consider having a dedicated help forum where questions can be posted and plan time to review the questions as your course progresses to constantly develop the FAQ

C.

Contact point provided

With potentially large participant numbers you may want to carefully consider the mechanism for contact that you encourage. There can also be a large amount of discussion activity on a MOOC platform and a large amount of notification emails to manage, if you want to receive these. One strategy is to use a dedicated email account for use on the MOOC, so that all activity related to the MOOC can be managed there. This could be shared amongst your MOOC facilitation team.

D.

Selected individual support

There may be individual participants who seek out individual support from facilitators, and clear instructions of whether this level of facilitation is available should be made clear in the MOOC information.

A.

Authentic, real-world

Activities are encouraged to be shared  in real world situations, offline in communities, or by interacting with existing online communities.

B.

Participant-driven outcomes

Participants are encouraged to set their own goals and outcomes as the initial part of signing up to the course. If these were shared in the site, it could be possible to map common themes and expectations and address these as the course progresses.

C.

Self-serve certificates

There are third party certification, often free, portfolio and content aggregation tools that allow participants to collect evidence and self-certify their course participation.

D.

Quizzes

Enable self-knowledge checking, could be participant-built

E.

Peer-awarded badges

Portable open badges to symbolise meeting outcomes of course. Due to large participant numbers having peers able to reward a badge once they receive it, is a useful way to avoid being unable to facilitate badge awarding. Needs rubric/guide to assist participants to make judgement on quality if not just based on completion.

F.

Platform-generated completions

Auto-generated based on completion and/or minimum score.

G.

Authenticated completions

Usually where there is formal partnership for developing a MOOC on a platform as extensive as an learning management system, because this requires authenticating the identity of the participant and proctoring of activities in some way.

H.

Credit for coursework

Participation in a MOOC as an entry pathway to formal courses is becoming easier to facilitate, but does require authenticated completions. This is still an emerging area with technical and policy challenges.

A.

Evaluation planning

Decide on the measures for success that you will evaluate the course on, from the start and what information you will need to evaluate this success.

B.

Platform activity reports

Detailed data may be available on hosted platforms, for distributed platforms you may need to allow time to crunch and merge data together in order to gain a level of analysis.  Patterns in data, visual and statistical analysis can be useful to look at in terms of how participants engaged and used along with web server logs to gauge use of materials.

C.

Participant profiling

Using surveys and sign up information (e.g. user profile pages) to identify participant demographics and activity.

D.

Participant satisfaction

Providing a mechanism for feedback, as well as evaluating and responding to the feedback can be difficult with a large cohort, so allow scope to analyse and process this information if collected.

E.

Follow-up survey

This can be useful, and managed through the MOOC platform and/or social media tools, to determine what impact the course had on personal or professional development for participants.

A.

Public archiving

Keeping the course pages  available after a cohort has completed the course,  for anyone to read and contribute to.

B.

Social ‘rippling’

Encourage participants to set up or join online social media communities spawned from the cohort of course participants.

C.

Reuse as is

Run the course again without changes to learn from a second cohort.

D.

Tweak and re-use

Review the course after its first iteration; consider participant feedback and facilitator experience to provide a different experience next time.

E.

Publish/present findings

Disseminate what you learn from the course as openly as possible, either formally as publications, or informally as blog posts. Consider open journal publications.

F.

Join with others

Consider broadening your subject coverage, expanding the MOOC by inviting other content experts to contribute.

G.

Focus and intensify

Look for avenues and opportunities to provide more support or more intensive facilitation, or to focus on specific learning of your experience facilitating a MOOC.

H.

Support others to do the same

Share your experiences openly with colleagues, especially across the existing boundaries of teams and discipline areas.   the successes and the fails. Promote your efforts in the open space as being experiments –in-progress without the pressure of being exemplars.  Demonstrate potential of taking creative risk in subject discipline and pedagogies.

I.

Redesign your model

Try a completely different approach and compare and contrast these to determine which approach results in better outcomes for participants and facilitators.