Making MOOCs

What does it take to make a MOOC? Explore the Grow-your-own MOOC kit here

Grow-your-own MOOC kit

Sustaining the efforts and effects

Key questions:  How will you measure quality of the open online course? How will you use feedback? How will you reuse, share resources and learnings from your experience in the open space?

A MOOC may take place at a specific point in time over a number of weeks. MOOC engagement data and experience suggests that about 4 weeks is a good length to sustain participation. Longer courses can be justified, but in a situation where participants are often doing the course in the spare time and don’t have a binding commitment to completion, shorter durations are more effective. To cover more ground, consider a Part 1 and Part 2 course, both with 4 weeks duration.

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.