The MOOC MOOC

I'm participating this week in a MOOC on MOOCs, aka "moocmooc"  (#moocmooc) through the new Canvas Network, that formally launched its first round of courses today.  I have many thoughts on MOOCs (massive open online classes), some of which I'll share this week.

Now, I have to admit that I'm a tad biased. Seattle Central has a MOOC on Canvas.net - US History 2. It was designed by faculty member Nate Weston. Nate did the heavy lifting of creating the content, I spent a significant part of Winter break acting as instructional designer, putting the content into Canvas and making it pretty.  It turned out pretty nicely, if I may say so myself.  It's self paced, based on one of our correspondence courses, with no real interaction between the faculty and the students and little interaction between the students themselves.  This is a total experiment and I'm very curious to see how it turns out.  To date, over 300 people from all over the world have enrolled.

US history MOOC enrollments from 1/3/13

If nothing else, it is quite exciting that this many people are interested in US History.  Whether they complete the course or not (a huge complaint about MOOCs - completion), they will certainly know more about US History then they did when they started. Nate has a fabulous take that focuses on minorities and women and their experience over the last century, so even those knowledgeable about history will be intrigued by his innovative approach. Toss in the free online textbook, compelling images and videos from archives of history and the fact that the class is totally free - hey, what's not to like?

Plus, it's sort of a try before you buy sort of thing. If student's like the class, they can register at Central, interact with the instructor and earn credit, hopefully increasing enrollments for us.

So, as I blog about MOOCs this week, know that I do have some personal interest in the idea - I don't see it as an end to traditional education, but merely another way to learn.

Teaching a MOOC

I've been thinking about you all and about the many posts in my head that don't quite make it onto the computer. A couple of weeks ago, I was walking through a relatively empty airport in Texas around 11PM, listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Slate's Culture Gabfest, when a poetry professor came on and started talking about his love affair with teaching a MOOC (massive open online class).  

He started out expressing his complete disdain for anything that would put any distance between he and his students and teaching online was clearly in that camp. Then, by some miracle, he started working with some technologists that he respected and before he knew it, he was teaching poetry to 10,000 people and it totally changed the way he thought about teaching. Very compelling listening - I recommend it to you.

On the MOOC note, I should say that this week, Canvas announced its new Canvas Network that will make MOOCs more possible for smaller colleges like Seattle Central. Indeed, we are one of the Canvas Network pilot colleges and will be sharing our US History II as a free self paced course.

Resources

• Slate's Culture Gabfest -http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest.html
• The Culture Gabfest You Big MOOC edition - start listening around 21:25 to jump right to the MOOC conversation.
• Canvas Network -https://www.canvas.net/ 
• Splash page for US History II on the Canvas Network - 

Student feedback on OER

I am presenting on a panel on Thursday about Open Course Library adoption and OER in general.  I thought I would share with you an informal survey of my students from summer quarter. I was sort of surprised by the results.

I don't know if you can really see this. Here are the options. Students were asked to select as many as are true for them.

• I think it is great not to have to buy a textbook (25%)
• I think it is a hassle to have to print out all of the readings (5%)
• I often read the readings on my desktop or laptop computer instead of printing them out (25%)
• I often read the readings on my mobile device instead of printing them out (5%)
• I like that I can get the readings for free, but I wish there was an option to buy a printout of all the readings in the bookstore (15%)
• Saving money on textbooks is really important to me (10%)
• I wish more faculty had free alternatives to a paid textbook (0%)
• I wish we just had a regular textbook (5%)
• No answer (10%)

I think the answers in bold are rather startling.  Some students did not trouble filling out the multiple options, so that may have skewed the results. I'll look forward to trying this survey again this quarter.

Moment of Panic

I've been slaving away on the orientation of the course all weekend, trying to get everything lined up, amazed once again and the astonishing number of balls one has to keep in the air to successfully launch an online class. No wonder it goes badly so often!

I spent 90 minutes this afternoon recording the orientation videos, using a headset to get some decent sound. I uploaded the videos to YouTube, posted the links in Canvas and was finally done.  Phew!

So, I was clicking through the orientation, about to go to bed, just making sure all is well for tomorrow when I played one of the videos and there was no audio. I turned up the volume. Nope, just no audio. I couldn't believe it. I really wanted to cry. I had checked each video as I recorded them (all 9 of them!) and they had sound then. Something must have gone wrong in the processing or in uploading to YouTube. I'd have to record them all again. 

I was just dejectedly leaving my computer when I noticed my headset was still plugged in. The audio was going into the headset speakers.  I unplugged them and, voila!, sound. What a relief! I can sleep in peace.

References
  one of my orientation videos

Standard 1 Paranoia

Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know that I am not a perfectionist. However, I do try to get things mostly right.  However, in some areas, mostly right doesn't cut it.  The start of an online class is one of those times.  I will confess to you that this was brought home to me two weeks ago.

My American Government class was supposed to start at the beginning of fall quarter on September 24.  Through a series of administrative mishaps, the course never got scheduled.  As late as Sept 20, we didn't have an item number so even if students knew about it, they couldn't register.  Given the 50 million things on my plate, I found it easy to procrastinate finishing a class that might not even go.

When we finally did get an item number, on Thursday before the Monday start, there was some talk of making the course a compressed start. I've been playing with this idea and hoping to serve late arriving students by offering some 8 week classes nested in the 10 week quarter. I didn't know for sure that we were going to do this until Monday. Yes, the Monday that the quarter started.

Over the weekend, I was desperately working to polish off the course. To save time, I copied over lots of stuff from my Global Studies class.  I went through and modified most of it to match the current course and college, but there were a few things I missed.  Little things like that are crazymaking for the students.

Also, it was later in the day on Monday when the new course start date was confirmed. I wrote to the students, but several had already started the class and some were already confused by the little errors caused by a class that was mostly right.

QM Standard 1 is all about the start of a course (is the purpose of the course clear to the students and is it evient how to begin and move through the course), but it is really only part of the story. I believe this course meets every element of Standard 1, but if I link to the academic dishonesty policy at Highline CC for a class at Seattle Central CC, students will be confused. Some toss it off as an understandable error, but there are always a few students who take everything literally and are completely immobilized until they achieve clarity. Thus, my Standard 1 paranoia.

So, as I prepare for my new start on Monday, I really want it to be completely right - no errors.  I need to re-establish credibility with the students who were confused by the first day of confusion two weeks ago. Also, there is the cognitive load issue discussed in my last post - in 8 weeks, they have even less time to be confused.

I will, of course, miss something. We always do.  I'll let you know what it is and how it plays out in the coming weeks.

QM Conference and Modules

I'm at the Quality Matters conference in Tucson, AZ. As is often the case, the best part of the conference is the people I get to talk to between the sessions. 

Today, I sat down with George Guba, an instructional designer from North Carolina.  as we were talking course design, he talked about the challenges in persuading faculty to change their ways to more pedagogically sound practices, like getting away from weekly work.  I was aghast. I always use weekly modules.  I stopped him mid sentence - why would I want to stop using weekly organization and what would I go to instead?  He suggested that the research supported a two week module as being a better fit for adult learners who are learning online.  As he explained it, I could see his point -easier to get in the small nuggets of learning that are better than large chunks, easier to arrange around busy lives, etc. I could also see how this would work better in a 15 week semester than a 10 week quarter. I tossed that issue into the mix. He still advocated for two week units.

Now, this is especially relevant for me because my American Government class did not start 2 weeks ago. We decided very last minute (like the first day of the quarter) to turn it into a late start compressed class. So, the class begins on Monday, Oct 8.  I need to cram my 15 modules into 8 weeks.  I need to completely rethink the organization of the class.  I've been so perplexed by the best way to do this that I have put it off, hoping that clarity would come to me. Well, perhaps it has, in the voice of George.  I promised myself that I wasn't going to bed tonight without having this finished, so I'll let you know how it goes.

I also talked with Jo Ann Monroe from Tacoma Community College. I learn something new every time I talk to her - she's great.  Today we were talking at lunch about our Canvas pilots.  She talked about one challenge of Canvas being that it was very easy for students to skip (intentionally or unintentionally) important but non-assessed parts of the class, like lectures and readings, and just go straight to the assignments.  Jo said she took care of this by having the course open straight to the modules and requiring they be completed in order.  This would certainly achieve the goal of getting the student to move through the materials properly, but it also seems really big brother to me.

However, yesterday in a session on universal design (QM Standard 8), the presenters talked about cognitive load and course design. Should the student's mental energy go towards figuring out where stuff was and how to accomplish the work? Or is it better spent learning the material? Well the answer to that is a no-brainer - of course I want the energy going towards learning content. So, I am seriously planning to make those modules more linear and required.  Again, I'll figure this out today and let you know.

Resources:
Nuts and Bolts: Brain Bandwidth - Cognitive Load Theory and Instructional Design by Jane Bozarth

Crunch Time

Late Post - I originally wrote this on 9/21 but forgot to post it. . .

It's crunch time. The quarter starts tomorrow and, I will confess, I'm not quite ready (sounds like summer all over again!). Through a series of unfortunate events, my class didn't actually get scheduled until about 3 days ago. The uncertainty of it all enabled me to procrastinate, as is my habit.  So, now you can peek in on how a seasoned online instructor builds much of a class in just a few days.

On the positive side, I have been thinking about this for a long time. My syllabus was essentially done and I had built the structure of the class in Canvas using the Free for Teachers space.

As I'm building from scratch in Canvas, I am taking a Modules approach - I created 10 modules for each week, plus one for the orientation, syllabus documents (includes rubrics, expectations, etc), the service learning project, the final and a Start Here module. So, I have 15 modules in all. Next, I locked them down by date, so they don't open until the appropriate week (with an added bonus of no one being able to see there is nothing in the module yet). I took away many of the navigational tools to create a clean interface.