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. |