My second stab at disseminating our thoughts about open online courses and the pedagogical implications of open courses is in this abstract submitted to the ALT-MOOC-SIG.
The workshop addresses SIG themes:
- Growing your own Mooc
- Designing & planning for ‘massive’
In the workshops participants will
- Identify & share examples from experience of new learning designs & spaces
- Synthesise or adopt an explanatory framework (model) for dialogic (M)OOCs
- Apply their framework to designing, delivering and supporting open online courses.
The wider aim of the workshop is to promote open academic practice through OOCs.
Oxford Brookes University is developing and offering open online courses in a range of subjects. These short courses of four to six weeks duration are founded on group & individual activity. Participants engage in sustained discussion with ideas & people for about 2 to 3 hours a day, for 2 or 3 days a week (about 10 hours a week). Like all our courses, our OOCs are:
- Activity-based: we do & make things in groups, using online tools
- Experiential: tutors & participants draw on their experience
- Dialogic: we talk together both synchronously (real time, e,g, in webinars) & asynchronously (e.g. discussion boards & social networks)
- Participatory: tutors are present & engaged as participants
- Community-based: linked to disciplines & relevant communities in work & society.
- Peer evaluated
- Outcomes-led: structured around curricula & aims, mapped, & in some cases accredited, to UK Higher Education frameworks.
Activities & Timings
- A troublesome threshold between the utopian & the real: open OOCs as heterotopia
- Examples of heterotopia in your teaching & your institution (Small group, facilitated discussion & feedback from 4 or 5 perspectives)
- Creative appropriation: blended learning as third space. Learners create their own learning environments outside, inside & in-despite of institutional intentions.
- What works: tools, roles, norms & community: applying discipline to creativity, responsibly, in OOCs
- Synthesis & final questions.
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