Coursera vs. Connected Courses – Week 2

On the plus side, I think that I have decided to create my Coursera story to share why I think those ICT strands are important so that I can share the why of my class with students, parents and colleagues.

Observing the Connected Courses Hangouts without having a chance to participate in the conversation (since I can never make the live broadcast time) has actually been great. From this one video I have three pages of notes and ideas I want to consider. I think that because it is a conversation, I am drawn in to the conversation in a fishbowl in a way that doesn’t seem to happen as much with a “talking head” video.

Speaking of talking heads, the Coursera videos were, again, well made but repetitive. I found myself constantly checking how many more there were and calculating how many more minutes there were to go.  A few of the articles were quite interesting and I thought that I might be able to make use of the content.

I got some feedback on my Coursera work from Week 1 and I was a little confused… I’m not sure how but others were able to view my work and I ended up with a grade from them. Three people provided feedback – one seemed to really like the ideas, one really didn’t like that I hadn’t made up my mind yet and scored me quite low and the third was somewhere in the middle. Somehow I ended up with a score of 13. I have no idea what that was out of. I like that the instructors have said that peer feedback is important and I agree. But I am quite unaware of how to give others feedback, how I got feedback or what the grade means… I need Cathy on her soapbox!

I was also a little frustrated with our week 2 Coursera assignment. In Week 1 we had to declare a tentative topic for our digital story. Several of the articles talked about the importance of an iterative process for developing a script and doing some research. However, our next expected assignment is to create a script and storyboard – this left very little time to refine a topic, write a script and develop a storyboard. I have decided to break the rules and work at my own pace. Maybe someone will just give me a badge someday when I “achieve the level” and if not, it doesn’t matter  – I can still make my own art! (thanks, ds106)