Reflections on my first day in OLDS MOOC

I’m starting to lose track of how many MOOCs I’ve joined, but it’s certainly a lot more than I’ve participated in actively. I’ve completed one. Of close colleagues and friends, this achievement stands matched only by my esteemed colleague Ashley Towers. The suspicion that the MOOC craze is just educational planking is hardly helped by the fact that Coursera and Udacity are pedagogically threadbare. If only someone would get involved who understood online  learning.

Enter the UK Open University with OLDS MOOC, (Open Learning Design Studio). The OU has been doing great distance learning for decades.  My wife’s first experience of HE was with the OU  and its books got me on the right side of database design during my Masters. I joined the OLDS MOOC with warm feelings tempered by bad MOOC experiences. My “hello OLDSmooc message” was entitled “sceptical late arriver says hi“. Gratifyingly, Joshua Underwood, one of the course team soon replied. I felt better already. This was a MOOC with a human face beyond video lectures.

New Tricks?

1. Google Groups for discussions. “Courserans” are encouraged to go down this route, but it’s an optional extra and when I tried it our group found little use for it. On OLDSmooc, Groups are a key tool for collaborative work. What’s not so great is the long list of discussions you’re faced with on the OLDSmooc Open Discussion. On tutor-led questions (e.g. “what does learning design mean for you?”), you get overlapping soliloquies. Nothing compared to the raging solipsistic chaos seen on Coursera Discussion boards, but I suspect that’s more due to the truly massive scale of those courses than anything intrinsic to Google Groups or the OLDSmooc approach.
2. OLDSmooc uses Google Sites as its foundation and glue. Course details, timetables etc are here or embedded here. The design and navigation is clear and if you are so minded, you can click ahead to see skeleton versions of what future weeks hold.
3. “Cloudworks”. I’ve never had a clue what Cloudworks was, despite creating an account some time ago. I’m still not sure what I make of it – that will have to wait for another post. What I can say now is that splitting the course between Google Sites, Google Groups and Cloudworks gave me usability friction burns. When I got to Cloudworks I felt lost. There were instructions on the main site, but the transition to an unfamiliar space (I don’t think there’s anything else quite like Cloudworks), made them hard to remember or apply.

I want to go home!

I thought about giving up. Having started late, I couldn’t find a group to collaborate with. I  was using a novel site with little guidance, I was unsure why I was doing the course at all: curiosity had got me into it, but I needed more than that to stay. I felt like a new kid in a playground where everyone was busy with unfathomable stuff. I was going to have to meet some like minded people if I was going to stick it out.