There are a million details to figure out and an equal number of decisions to be made at this stage of the course-building game, and the numbers are even more terrifying for a MOOC. Normally we'd be thinking about course design from a macro standpoint first, but before we even get THERE, we have to ask something MOOC-specific that our normal courses don't face: where and how to teach it.
Our normal courses take place in our LMS (was Blackboard 9, moving to Canvas). But we have no University-sanctioned MOOC venue as yet, so it's kind of a big deal to figure out what we're going to do.
If we go to a consortium like Coursera, EdX, or Canvas.Net, that would have lots of advantages. There would be an interface for me to use on my end, and a single "report point" for the distributed students. There would also be a way for people to FIND our open course, which is no small matter. What good is a MOOC if only fourteen people know about it?
Those things cost money to join (I assume) and anyway my university hasn't pulled that trigger yet. So I might be looking at having to cobble together something else, most likely not just one workaround, but a whole series of them.
Are there completely free standalone LMS systems? I found a couple mentioned online (EDU 2.0 and Schoology) but they don't look like they would be free at scale, and I'm hoping for hundreds or thousands of users.
Optimally, I'd want an LMS that is free, cloud-based, scalable to thousands of users, and allows users to register themselves. Something closer to a social network than an LMS might work - Edmodo was my first choice but then I remembered it's aimed at K-12 and doesn't have university solutions that I know of.
Moodle is fine and all that, but I need my university to set it up and run it. Ditto Drupal or some other CMS.
I'm left with poor choices. We could run the entire class out of a discussion forum maybe! Or from a Facebook page, where the links are posted there first? Might be an interesting experiment in and of itself, to use FB as the primary platform rather than a bolt-on, as most courses do.
A wordpress (or for that matter, blogspot) site could handle the content delivery side of things, but what's really needed is that single point of contact with the students at home, ideally the sort of place that has a gradebook. In other words, an LMS.
For the moment, I'm considering a Facebook page as "home base", with permalinks in its profile page linking away to the other LMS-like components that will "live" in other websites. Maybe I could try LearnBoost as the gradebook. It has a Facebook login, which dovetails nicely with my workaround plan, and it works with Google Apps (which I don't use much, but I certainly have a Google account).
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