One week into the MOOC (I'm doing as part of H817), and I thought I'd pause to reflect using the Gibbs Reflective Cycle - hey why not?
1) Description: During the first week of the MOOC, I've done some of the nuts and bolts stuff: linked blog to the aggregator, joined Twitter (I know I didn't have to do this, but I wanted to confront my lack of social media experience), completed a one hour OpenLearn module (death and postponement, from the social care offering), completed the reading and done both the Research Priorities and Open Education Visualisation activities, though haven't yet posted an image for the latter, and browsed through other's contributions on the open forums.
2) Feeling: My first foray into the course material led me to feeling overwhelmed quickly. There's just so much stuff to look at - that is the first problem. You have to define yourself a starting point, which was new to me. Also, the volume of other people on the course (around 500 I believe) leads to a huge volume of posts on the various forums. I constantly felt like I was playing catch-up; not able to keep abreast of developments as I had done in our tutor group forums for the first part of H817.
3) Good and Bad points: Good points first: surviving the first week and feeling enthusiastic enough to continue. (Would I if I hadn't paid for H817, and had been just enrolled on the MOOC? Not sure). Another good thing - I'm glad I had a go at Twitter. I rather like it, have come across a couple of snippets of info I might like to use. I wouldn't have done it if it were not for this course. Another good thing - I feel I am having the warts and all experience of MOOCs that I wanted. Boy is this not easy!
Bad points then - Easy to get isolated. If it were not for eagle eyed tutors roaming the forums and picking up on dispirited posts, I feel I might have been left out on my own. I think some of my fellow H817ers from my tutor group must have been similarly overwhelmed as I didn't experience any peer support in finding my feat.
Other bad points - technical glitches. Others, not I, had troubled with the blog aggregator. The delay in posts appearing is not ideal. When it's your first time at something (like blogging), you like some pretty near instant feedback to know if anyone else can actually read what you've posted. There was also a lack of discipline around how the forum conversations emerged (4 different areas you could post a response to the priorities activity for example). It just makes things so busy!
4) Analysis: The MOOC environment has some key differences to the tutor group led online H817 course. a) Volume of participants - this makes it hard if not impossible to read everything. So what to read? Skim or deep-dive? b) Starting points: We all had very different starting points on H817, but this seems to have been multiplied. At the start of H817 we introduced ourselves before really getting into the nitty gritty. On the MOOC, some participants had posted responses to the activities before I'd even read them! c) Lack of hand-holding by tutors. This is possibly a bit unfair - they have a lot more people to get round. But the consequence is it feels like less hand-holding. Ok, perhaps we shouldn't need it, and that is part of the MOOC experience, but I also thought peer support was supposed to be a part of the MOOC, and what I've experienced to date is not sufficient.
5) Conclusion: Looking at my above points, perhaps all of these are consequences of the increase in magnitude you get with a MOOC. I've struggled - in finding a small group of people that it's easy to converse with at a level similar to my own. The very confident and able tend to post a lot, so it's difficult to connect with those that aren't and don't. In the tutor led forums, it was easier to pick out a small number of individuals to 'bounce off'. Then you can develop a little 'network within a network' where you can cultivate a particular conversation. Again, I'm possibly being both unfair and premature here. I was certainly still finding my feet at the end of week one of H817, but we had done some additional guided activities around getting to know one another. As with so many things, this seems equally important here in the MOOC as to anywhere else.
6) Action Plan: Stick with it (I've paid!). Try and connect with some individuals and develop my 'network within a network'. Twitter has helped here, since it mixes familiar faces with those on the MOOC, so it feels less scary logging into that account than visiting the h817open forums. Keep recording all this stuff on the blog - as someone else said, it will demonstrate distance travelled (or otherwise) at some point in the future.