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?

Building a MOOC, Part 2 - Finding an LMS

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).

Building a MOOC, Part 1 - Choosing a Course Name

Want to help me crowdsource a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)?

A MOOC is a free-for-everyone college course that doesn't actually offer college transcript credit, but it's open to the public and completely free.

Together we'll go through the whole process. I haven't built one yet, but I have permission to offer one of the first from our university (Univ of South Florida) in about 8 months, and I've got a course in mind that I've taught before, and which should excite the imagination of the masses: fairy tales, with a particular emphasis on Disney.

I'm going to go ahead and blog my thoughts as I develop this course, in the hopes that it will inspire and assist others going down the same path later, as well as help me harness the skills and experience of any readers who have already blazed this path and want to offer assistance to me.

This isn't really supposed to be about me, but I'll mention in brief that I'm the director of USF's teaching center, hold a Ph.D. in German Literature, and have taught fairy tales many times before. The Disney connection is a personal interest, since I worked for Disneyland for 15 years long ago, and now write popular blogs as well as publish independent books about the Disney theme parks. More about my academic life can be seen here.

My plan is to mention my goals, my worries, my obstacles, and my workarounds as I navigate through the waters on building my first MOOC. Everything from finding appropriate activities to dealing with copyright. From choosing things that can "scale up" to a large audience to balancing workload on the grading end. And dozen other such topics.

Oh, and did I mention that it's a gamified course, with principles from video games added in many analog (some manual) ways to enhance engagement?

I figured that I couldn't realistically be a teaching center director who advocated active learning without also walking the talk, so the class is also a "flipped classroom" where content delivery is done more as homework than as primary class time -- though in an online environment without a synchronous component, in a way all online classes are flipped. But I'm keeping with the term. For F2F courses, a flipped classroom means a focus on interactions and practice, and THAT'S the part I want to highlight even in my online class.

Thus, this is a real "kitchen sink" class: a crowdsourced, flipped, gamified MOOC on fairy tales. 

I'll unpack the goals and projected bottlenecks one at a time in future posts. For today, let's just start at the beginning: what to call it?

In the past, I've used "Romantic Fairy Tales" and "Fairy Tales From Grimms to Disney." The course focuses on European fairy tales (not those of all cultures) and avoids the folklorist approach for the most part (not as much emphasis on Joseph Campbell and universal human storytelling, and more focus on why THIS author changed the story in THIS fashion).

My first thought is to emphasize the Disney angle, as this will have widest appeal. How about: "Disney's Fairy Tales and Their Sources"? We could start each unit by looking at Disney and working backwards, instead of vice versa.

Thoughts?

Kevin
drkevinyee@gmail.com