Making MOOCs

Grow-your-own MOOC kit

Enrolment and facilitation

Key questions: How will you enable participants to be involved in the course? How will you interact with your participants?

MOOC enrolment is usually a simple sign-up form, requesting a username and password only, which can mean that you have a large participant base without knowing much about who they are, or what they expect from their online course experience. You can use pre-course surveys and ice-breaker activities to try to gain and insight into the cohort.

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.