- Seems to emphasize community as evidenced by the about ds106 video
- Is part of a ‘real university’
- There is no ‘teacher’
- Calls itself the ds106 ‘experience’ (as opposed to course)
- By the end of exploring the site I had bookmarked the page because I’d like to do the course! (first time that’s happened)
- The course itself is techie course. This seems rather typical of MOOCS, I haven’t seen so many for more traditional subjects. It’s like the technology is best used to teach itself…
- The course seems to require quite a lot of interaction with technology
- And being critical about the genre, so part techie part arty farty
- Uses very academic language to describe itself and then uses new literacies (short films) which are the opposite of academic
- Students can nominate each other’s’ work as ‘inspiring’.
- I do notice than in the student testimony video they are all young and nearly exclusively white and middle class (seeming)
- They have a Twitter site and a radio station
- I looked at the written assignments and most of them hadn’t been completed by anybody or at best 4 or 5 people out of a couple of hundred visits. I also noticed that the assignments seem to have been posted by users/students and I didn’t really get how many of them were related to the course? There seemed to be no quality control, shouldn’t there be something where the crowd can like assignments or they are taken off or something?
- I then went to the video assignments and found the same low uptake, which was surprising given that the course was all about digital literacies.
- Seems to be loads of bells and whistles like the radio station but doesn’t seem to to be that much meat on the bones?
- Students all get their own website, makes me wonder if it taps into peoples egos a fair bit?
- When they rolled it out they had 75 real students then 225 who joined from outside the course.
- Seems to be a connectivist underpinning Jim groom talks about nodes and networks a lot.
- Martha Burtis shows an assignment that has 125 completions, I wonder how many more there are like that? They do produce some more impressive stats though, forum posts running into the thousands and the like.
- She also talks about other course designers being able to use the assignment bank for their own ends. Interesting but potentially more time consuming than creating your own assignments I think?
- As you go through the site it seems to feel less like a cool and more like a place for like-minded people to come together and create stuff they obviously enjoy. Which is great, but the traditionalist in me says that does not a course make!
- An interesting feature is the way that course members added new features to the course. Like the student who added the course radio station, which was then integrated into the course itself.
- The last post I could find for the course was a year ago, I wonder if it’s still going?
FutureLearn
- Inmediately you see a diffierence in look, DS106 looks more DI, messy and ‘cool’, FL looks more ‘corporate’
- FL is a course agrregator and has partnerships with a variety UK universities, DS106 is based in one university in the US and aggregates content but NOT courses.
- FL is private but owned by the OU
- In DS106 all the promo stuff is participant produced. In FL it’s produced by ‘professionals’
- I guess because of the nature of FL it’s more about fixed content produced by professionals rather than the DS106 course which is co-produced.
- You have to sign up to do a course.
- You have personal navigation that tracks what you do.
- It uses this navigation to help control learning, so you have ‘to do’ lists and then ‘completed’, so there is a lot of structure there and it’s more linear. I guess this approach would suit some learners more than DS106…
- Still has the social element though with comments and discussion threads, although notice the comments about ‘being respectful’ goes without saying surely, but the ‘corporateness’ of the site makes it necessary.
- Assessment is much more fixed than DS106. If I was an employer in some ways I would prefer to see a Ss who have done a FL course, especially the ones who have purchased the certificate of completion, as it proves their commitment.
- Seems to be that universities include select courses on the site, rather than a stick everything on their MIT approach. This definitely gives it a feel of something that has been thought through carefully, and seems to be a way for the participating universities to display their wares.
- Again in a similar way to DS106 there seems to be a quite deliberate connectivist/constructivist approach to learning, although in the case of FL I suspect it is more explicitly thought through (to the point they provide links to their theoretical frameworks).
- DS106 has a dip-in-and-out approach, whereas FL is all about charting progress and knowing where you are going. I would say that the world is a better place for having both of these approaches!
Week 10 Activity 13
DS106
- Seems to emphasize community as evidenced by the about ds106 video
- Is part of a ‘real university’
- There is no ‘teacher’
- Calls itself the ds106 ‘experience’ (as opposed to course)
- By the end of exploring the site I had bookmarked the page because I’d like to do the course! (first time that’s happened)
- The course itself is techie course. This seems rather typical of MOOCS, I haven’t seen so many for more traditional subjects. It’s like the technology is best used to teach itself…
- The course seems to require quite a lot of interaction with technology
- And being critical about the genre, so part techie part arty farty
- Uses very academic language to describe itself and then uses new literacies (short films) which are the opposite of academic
- Students can nominate each other’s’ work as ‘inspiring’.
- I do notice than in the student testimony video they are all young and nearly exclusively white and middle class (seeming)
- They have a Twitter site and a radio station
- I looked at the written assignments and most of them hadn’t been completed by anybody or at best 4 or 5 people out of a couple of hundred visits. I also noticed that the assignments seem to have been posted by users/students and I didn’t really get how many of them were related to the course? There seemed to be no quality control, shouldn’t there be something where the crowd can like assignments or they are taken off or something?
- I then went to the video assignments and found the same low uptake, which was surprising given that the course was all about digital literacies.
- Seems to be loads of bells and whistles like the radio station but doesn’t seem to to be that much meat on the bones?
- Students all get their own website, makes me wonder if it taps into peoples egos a fair bit?
- When they rolled it out they had 75 real students then 225 who joined from outside the course.
- Seems to be a connectivist underpinning Jim groom talks about nodes and networks a lot.
- Martha Burtis shows an assignment that has 125 completions, I wonder how many more there are like that? They do produce some more impressive stats though, forum posts running into the thousands and the like.
- She also talks about other course designers being able to use the assignment bank for their own ends. Interesting but potentially more time consuming than creating your own assignments I think?
- As you go through the site it seems to feel less like a cool and more like a place for like-minded people to come together and create stuff they obviously enjoy. Which is great, but the traditionalist in me says that does not a course make!
- An interesting feature is the way that course members added new features to the course. Like the student who added the course radio station, which was then integrated into the course itself.
- The last post I could find for the course was a year ago, I wonder if it’s still going?
FutureLearn
- Inmediately you see a diffierence in look, DS106 looks more DI, messy and ‘cool’, FL looks more ‘corporate’
- FL is a course agrregator and has partnerships with a variety UK universities, DS106 is based in one university in the US and aggregates content but NOT courses.
- FL is private but owned by the OU
- In DS106 all the promo stuff is participant produced. In FL it’s produced by ‘professionals’
- I guess because of the nature of FL it’s more about fixed content produced by professionals rather than the DS106 course which is co-produced.
- You have to sign up to do a course.
- You have personal navigation that tracks what you do.
- It uses this navigation to help control learning, so you have ‘to do’ lists and then ‘completed’, so there is a lot of structure there and it’s more linear. I guess this approach would suit some learners more than DS106…
- Still has the social element though with comments and discussion threads, although notice the comments about ‘being respectful’ goes without saying surely, but the ‘corporateness’ of the site makes it necessary.
- Assessment is much more fixed than DS106. If I was an employer in some ways I would prefer to see a Ss who have done a FL course, especially the ones who have purchased the certificate of completion, as it proves their commitment.
- Seems to be that universities include select courses on the site, rather than a stick everything on their MIT approach. This definitely gives it a feel of something that has been thought through carefully, and seems to be a way for the participating universities to display their wares.
- Again in a similar way to DS106 there seems to be a quite deliberate connectivist/constructivist approach to learning, although in the case of FL I suspect it is more explicitly thought through (to the point they provide links to their theoretical frameworks).
- DS106 has a dip-in-and-out approach, whereas FL is all about charting progress and knowing where you are going. I would say that the world is a better place for having both of these approaches!