About‎ > ‎

OLDS MOOC how it works

The OLDS MOOC "Learning Design for a 21st Century Curriculum" is a project based 9 week course. We expect 500-1000 participants, and we hope a large portion of these will be working on a group project throughout the MOOC, dedicating 3-10 hours a week to it, and producing an innovative, robust and meaningful design for a learning activity or curricular resource.
We aim to provide a semi-structured, highly interactive, constructive and collaborative learning experience. This means that we set the scene - but you determine the plot.

In order to make that work, we need to provide simple, effective, and powerful learning practices.

The “spine” of the MOOC

The flow

  • Most of the activities are presented as clouds or cloudscapes on cloudworks, and you will be expected to set up your own workspace there (or in any other site you prefer). You will also be expected to contribute clouds and comments to the activity clouds or cloudscapes. Most importantly - you will be expected to provide your peers feedback on their work. Typically, the activities will also include a mechanism for you to provide us with feedback.
  • Each week will begin with an introductory message from the week’s facilitators, which will be sent out to the announcement list.
  • We will be using bibsonomy.org to share links and references. Please tag your entries with OLDSMOOC and the entries for each week with OLDSMOOC-Wn, where n is the week number.
  • If you tweet about the MOOC, or tweet anything relevant to the MOOC, please use the same tags.
  • Each day, the facilitators will send out a summary of the activities for that day to the announcement list, which will draw on your conversations on the open group, your contributions on cloudscape, any tweets or bibsonomy entries you have shared.
  • At the end of the week, we will have a synchronous convergence event. This event will be recorded, and a summary of it will be sent to the announcement list.

Your space

The OLDS MOOC is project-based and collaborative. Each week, you will be presented with a sequence of tasks which you will undertake individually or in project teams. In most tasks, you will produce some artefacts and share them and comment on your peer’s productions. These will build up to your learning design project.
In order to collate and share your work, you will set up an individual portfolio and a team workspace. We suggest you use cloudworks as a platform for these, and will guide you in doing so, but you can use any platform you like.

Local learning circle

You can complete this MOOC on your own, but we believe your experience will be much more fruitful if you have some friends for the journey. We strongly encourage you to form a local study circle. This could be based on your project team, a group of participants in your institution, or participants you identify as having similar interests or living nearby. You can use services such as http://www.meetup.com/ to set up your local study circle. Please list your circle at: http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2456 (or join an existing one).

A note on your privacy

As mentioned in the Research and Ethical use of data, we are conducting research and evaluation of the MOOC. We will use the discussions on the groups, the clouds and cloudscapes, the tweets and bibsonomy items, and any other public expressions we may find as research data. We will make an effort to annonymise the data, although it may sometimes be possible to track down the speakers from the content.