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?