Fairy Tales MOOC, with gamification elements

Among the classes I teach is one on Fairy Tales, with focus on Disney, Grimms, and Perrault. This college class is now available to the general public, and it's completely free!

The class is a massive open online course (MOOC) and is administered through canvas.net - it's free to sign up and take the class! It's a four-week course starting on August 5.

The class was built to expect about two hours of engagement/interaction ("work") per week, so it's not meant to overload the participants with chores and duties. In that sense, it's less rigorous than my regular college classes. This course does not have a completion certificate - you'd be taking it just for the fun of it.

There aren't any papers or projects. While the class does offer quizzes and discussion boards, there isn't really a rigorous process to "pass" the course since there isn't a certificate offered anyway.

The class is, however, experimental in a different sense: it's gone game elements in it. We added badges and group competition, as well as Easter eggs, throughout the class. This should be fun!

Please feel free to sign up and spread the word. I can't wait to share with you what these fairy tales used to mean and how they've been changed for modern audiences!! Sign up here: https://www.canvas.net/courses/fairy-tales-origins-and-evolution-of-princess-stories#enroll_form

Canvas.net limitations

Our university signed with Canvas.NET, and I spoke to a rep/handler/instructional designer today.

Things I learned:

• An 8-week course is probably too long. Four weeks is ideal
• Plan for 2-4 hours of work/effort by participants each week - far less than the usual college expectation
• Up to 30-50% of the users are accessing canvas.net via mobile devices, so I have to optimize the course for them. That means using Pages (not Modules, which is not in the app yet), and it means using the onscreen editor rather than uploaded HTML pages (so they can 'count' the hits right and so that it works with mobile). My custom CSS won't port over - I'm a sad panda.
• Discussion Boards and Pages links (navigation links) can't be hidden like I normally do, or else the mobile users can't access them. Argh! 
• The best workaround to host SWF videos for iOS devices to upload them to YouTube and embed - this works on all devices. 
• Best practice: lock modules until the date arrives when it's what everyone is working on (ie, don't turn on the whole course all at once). 

Instablogg to the rescue

I'm in the thick of constructing the first module, and since this MOOC will have gamification elements (including Easter eggs, hidden on individual pages), I needed a way to 'house' pages that students can't find by clicking around the interface.

Canvas.NET may be fully public, but my university's canvas requires a student ID, so that was out. Wikispaces and Google Sites both have "view all" buttons to see all the pages, which defeats the purpose of Easter eggs.

Solution: Instablogg.com, where you can build one single post anonymously and it's not linked to anything else. You can control if it's sharable and if there are comments on it. You can only edit it once published if you remember to save the edit-URL (which is different from the front-door URL of the actual content).

Building a MOOC, Part 6 - iRubric?

Anyone out there use iRubric? It's an online rubric generator (there are many) but it also holds a gradebook. Sounds like an LMS-free way to keep and record grades... will it work for a MOOC?

One thing I worry about is automation. At scale, you want to know you don't have to update things (and enroll people) manually. uReddit is probably easier for that.

Building a MOOC, Part 5 - uReddit

The main problems with a MOOC concern that push/pull issue about privacy. People want anonymity on the Internet, but if it's a CLASS, you have to know who is who. There's no accountability otherwise, and without accountability, there's usually a lot less learning.

So you need a system that recognizes users, lets them take tests, and tracks the results. This calls for a Learning Management System (LMS) like Blackboard or Canvas. But those are proprietary, and you can't just let outsiders use them. Plus you don't know who they are.

I think we'll see MOOC-friendly LMSs arrive on the market soon, but in the meantime we're in the realm of workarounds. If we join a Consortium (EdX, Coursera, Udacity, Canvas.net) they provide the LMS, but my university isn't there yet. So it's third-party stuff only for me. I've previously talked about some options for the LMS, and the limitations of each.

Recently I saw a presentation by a fellow faculty member who used University of Reddit (uReddit.com) as a MOOC LMS. This is not owned by Reddit, but they are allowed to use the Reddit name and logo.

Advantages:

• Users get tracked and can sign up with their own names/handles of their choosing
• Content can be hosted right here
• Discussion boards (or something similar to that) can be created via sub-Reddits

Disadvantages:

• There is no gradebook, and no quiz function. So you have to go third-party for that, too.

I'll keep you posted about what works, and what doesn't.

Building a MOOC, Part 4 - Timelines and Conferences

In academia, there's nothing like a little external motivation (pressure) to get you moving. So submitting a conference proposal before the work is even done can be a great motivator. Accordingly, I tossed my name into the hat for the Florida Distance Learning Association conference for September of this year - 8 months away.

Here was my proposal:

Going All-In: How to Create a Flipped, Gamified, Blended MOOC

 Abstract: Educators nibble at new technologies all the time, often in small bites to reduce workload and confusion. What does a course look like that combines many strategies at once? This course on fairy tales was built for Honors students, but opened as a MOOC as well. It includes a flipped classroom model, heavy gamification overlays, digital texts, and optional social media integrations. We will discuss how each of these elements can be added individually (or in bulk) to your own classes—all at no cost to you or to the students. Our emphasis will be on practical applications and plug-and-play takeaway strategies rather than presenting empirical research.

I guess I need to MOVE on this now, huh?! I am starting to get some answers on LMS, though, coming in the next posts...

Building a MOOC, Part 3 - Choosing Activities

One of my prime motivations for wanting to blog about my MOOC experience was to catalog my discoveries about online activities, interactive techniques, and tools that can be used in MOOC-y ways (meaning: automated, scalable, free). I collect such interactive techniques for face to face teaching, and it's always been one of my go-to workshops for faculty.

I'm delighted, therefore, to report that a great deal of groundwork has been done on this before. I'm speaking of a book by Curtis Bonk and Ke Zhang called "Empowering Online Learning" (Jossey-Bass, 2008), and it's got 100 or so of these activities.

I'm tickled to think about the possibilities of doing something different every week. Well, 3-4 different things every week. The importance of variation in teaching is often under-stressed, I feel, and that's doubly-true in a fully online environment.

Have a look at the list below (click to enlarge). Am I weird for becoming excited only dreaming of the possibilities?