On Monday I start taking part in a Learning Lab with the Masie Learning Consortium and using a tool called Curatr. The idea of the Lab is to get experience with the tool, using social learning and implementing gamification to the learning. 

Curatr encourages learners to create and curate content using gamification to reward and motivate. 

I’m just starting out on writing a paper on gamification in learning solutions so this is going to be great first hand experience of seeing it in action. 

I’ve also downloaded Curatr on my iPad to see how this works as a mobile learning experience and how they’ve designed their mobile app.

I’ve collected a few of my favourite buzz words for 2012 and 2013 and made a silly comic strip. Its funny listening to people throw these words into as many conversations as possible or trying to coin their own phrases :)

and just in case you didn’t know…

MOOC - massive open online course

MOCC - first time I saw this one was today - mid-sized online closed course

COC - ok totally made this one up - closed online course

MOOL - made this one up a while back - massive open online learning

An afternoon of brainstorming and here’s what we came up with…

Scheduled, regulated

This is the classic MOOC originated by leading US universities.  A top down approach designed to closely mirror a university lecture course. The combination of a scheduled syllabus and various social networking technologies facilitate peer group learning and review.

Self-paced, regulated

Organisations such as Khan Academy offer a range of video based lectures on demand along with basic quizzing and assessment tools.  The courses can be taken at any time, which means there is little sense of learning together ‘in a class’, although discussion forums have been added to facilitate some level of peer group learning.

Self-paced, unregulated

MOOC provider Udemy allows open access to instructors to design and distribute their self-paced courses. This can allow a very rapid expansion in the number of courses offered, however the lack of content curation means that learners have little guarantee of the quality.

Networked, crowdsourced

A few MOOCs are beginning to emerge where much of the content itself is developed and expanded on by the participants (eg through discussion forums and live virtual classrooms), whilst being facilitated by experienced instructors.  This highly social approach can offer very rapid and agile content development though would be difficult for delivery of a rigid syllabus.

 …and a handy little diagram

What is a MOOC anyway? Over the last few months I’ve spent a lot of time discussing with a colleague how we can define MOOCs, discussing whether or not we should be creating them, or using them, or are we in fact already doing them?

I read an article that breaks MOOCs down into three types: Content, Task and Network based. Whilst I think this is a good start, I don’t think this is necessarily right. For example, quite a few Coursera courses are very task based as part of the homework.

How many people need to attend or sign up to a MOOC to make it ‘massive’? Udemy is often mentioned as MOOCs but are they?  These platforms openly offer training but are very self paced with little or no collaboration or networking opportunity.

etMOOC is quite obviously ‘massive’ but is it a course? This to me feels more like open source learning through networking. The organisers of etMOOC are bringing everyone together and guiding the conversations. How will they know if people are learning? Will someone be collating all the useful content that people are posting across all the platforms? 

My fear is that the term MOOC has excited people and everyone wants to be in on the game without stopping and thinking about whether what they’re doing is any different to what’s already been done or if it really is a MOOC at all.

This term could well sum up how I’m going to feel in a few months time.. 

#etmooc is just kicking off and I’m already wondering how anyone is supposed to do any genuine networking and learning. They’re using blogs, twitter, google+, email and their own website, plus running virtual classroom sessions live a few times a week. 

I opened my gmail this morning to find 60+ posts from the G+ group.. too many to read in any detail so I skimmed down the stream.  They’re all say much of the same thing so how do I pick out which are going to be of use?  It could be too early to tell. I’m not on this mooc to pick holes and write reviews. I plan to get everything I can from it and I’m glad they’ve inspired me to finally kick off my blog.

I’m also taking on another mooc at the end of this month on Coursera.. I’ve probably bitten off more than I can chew.. Network error.. network meltdown? lets hope not!

2 weeks into the new year and its already been busier than I anticipated. I arrived back from a three week trip to India last weekend feeling lovely and relaxed and enjoying the envious looks from others at my sun kissed skin. Getting back into work was hard for the first few days. My brain had slipped quite nicely into just thinking about where to eat, which sun lounger to lay on and remembering to top up the SPF. 

Before my holiday, MOOCs were a hot topic in my working day and I’ve come back to find it’s still very high on my radar.  There seem to be new buzz words, people finding ways to differentiate one from the other, new pedagogy being discussed.. its quite fascinating to follow.

#etmooc has caught my interest as it’s a mooc focusing on networking and the interactions between attendees, rather than pushing out schedules and learning material and having the social aspect as an add on.

I work in Learning Technologies so am really excited to see what this MOOC turns out. The only blogging I’ve done before is on our companies internal social network so this is going to be a learning experience in itself!