Clow, Doug (2013). MOOCs and the funnel of participation. In: Third Conference on Learning Ana- lytics and Knowledge (LAK 2013), 8-12 April 2013, Leuven, Belgium.
Clow, Doug (2013). MOOCs and the funnel of participation. In: Third Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2013), 8-12 April 2013, Leuven, Belgium. http://oro.open.ac.uk/36657/1/DougClow-LAK13-revised-submitted.pdf

What I Know (or think I know) about MOOCs

The idea of a mooc is really appealing: participate in a course on your own time, at no cost and with people all over the world. You might do it just to learn something new or for the fun of it. It sounds so simple and rewarding but I have learned that completing a mooc, when you don’t need the grade or certification for anything, is a real challenge! I am certainly not the first person to start an online course and not complete it: according to Max Nisen, the MOOC dropout rate stands at 90%. I have signed up for a few in the past and I don’t think that I have completed one in it’s entirety (see previous blog post – oops, nothing happened there).

This past summer I did manage to complete a 1-hour Udemy course about launching a wordpress website and then to migrate my blog from wordpress.com to wordpress.org – something I didn’t manage in two rounds of ds106. But this really just involved watching a series of online videos, searching for how to migrate from one wordpress platform to the other and then playing around in wordpress.com It was more of a task than anything else.

My Fall MOOC Plan

This fall I hope to participate in 3 online “courses”.  However, rather than feel guilty about not completing all tasks I am planning to cut myself some slack this time:

  1. I think that the peer pressure associated with signing up for a Coursera Course in Digital Storytelling together with friends in other countries will keep me on track to complete that one (assuming they stick with it too).
  2. I have signed up for Connected Courses but since I do not teach in higher education I only plan to take part in what I think that I can make use of in my teacher-training/ support role at school. I am really interested in co-learning (with peers and students) and there is a terrific line-up of facilitators so I just want to hear what they have to say and maybe put a little bit of it into action.
  3. ds106 is always on my radar and maybe the new iteration of The Wire will be too engaging to not participate but if not, that’s fine.

Learning Is Social

I do believe that we learn best when we can bounce ideas off one another or collaborate on a specific task or project. So I am looking forward to working with some of you on digital storytelling and/ or connected learning on the open web. I promise to “show-up” if we are working on something together but, when that task is complete, if I leave the ranks of the amazing 10% who stick with the rest of the course then know that I am still thinking about these topics (as I have been for years) and I really admire your organization and perseverance.