Time waits for no man – or woman

When I started to write this blog, I had ages before my dissertation on MOOCs needed to be completed. August was months away, and I had plenty of time to think, capture my thoughts and play around with ideas.  #Whoknew.

So, I’m determined to make an effort (more than an effort really) to stop procrastinating and ‘thinking about the plan’.  Now is the time to take the bull by the horns, the MOOC by the tail and as Nike would say, ‘Just do it’.

With this in mind, I have been scouring my MOOCs Scoop.it, reviewing the tonne of resources that I have been collecting since about November 2012.  I have found a few gems, in particular Calvin Carr’s ‘E-Learning Bill of Rights’.  I think this is great.  This is similar to the kind of quality code for learners (UK people recognise this QAA term).  It’s a simple list of what a learner should be able to expect from participating in an online course.  This is particularly important when we offer MOOCs as ‘free’.  Our time is expensive (and gets spent quickly, see note above!)  and if you use your precious time on a course that gets pulled, what happens to you?  You can’t get your time back.  So it’s nice to see that there has been some thought about the learners in relation to unregulated MOOC development , something to bear in mind when we create any form of online course.

Thinking about Course design and development, there has been wonderful dissemination of learning from EdX and Coursera about lessons learnt from their experiences in designing their courses.  In my collection, I found these short videos from Stanford, which are wonderful.  I want to take as much as I can not just from the design aspect but from the learner/teacher experiences.  They are providing so much for us to look at and think about, I hope enough people take notice.  This is not just good for MOOCs, but it’s good for online education generally.  #Whoknew.