One of the biggest challenges with writing an OU course on digital video is that course production takes at least a year, and that's a short one. They go through several drafts, out to critical readers, to an editor and back, media gets made and everywhere you can expect deadlines to slip.
This means that we're writing in January-March for a November course and that feels really tight. By then some aspect of the technology: hardware or software will have moved on, and if we were trying to nail down everything that a student should use with the course, that would feel unlucky - time to start thinking about updating the course if the student numbers warrant it, or to cancel it if they don't. By the expected end of the course (May 2016) we've no way of sensibly predicting what technologies will be in vogue, never mind how the software will look or feel.
So the idea is to throw the job of updating the course over to the students. We'll show them how to research all the things they need and provide them with a place to effectively share and compare resources. If we can effectively bring what they find back into the course we're ahead - well maybe we're keeping up. It all hinges on making doing that kind of research and sharing rewarding enough to be sustained through 10 weeks of study.
One of the things that the whole Web 2.0 fad obscures is that it's easy to do this badly. Looking at Facebook (and seeing as we're here) Blogger, we see things that work. But there must be a long tail of lame almosts that never got the development time or failed to be base on how people work in the first place. There's a lot of description or normative stuff written about it all, but I'm not finding anything too helpful on how to trigger and sustain social learning online.
So suggestions welcome, and in the meantime some ideas are:
- Publicly recognise good behaviour - student of the week kind of thing. We could use the moderators to pick out and thank students who help others resolve issues.
- Open Studio - We're using an OU developed platform called Open Studio for students to catch, tag and share media (including their own projects) or websites. It already has comment facilities, but our fantastic developer Jane is going to add a rating system for us - so students can give each others' finds a rating of between 1 and 5 stars.
- Task driven - each time Open Studio is used, it will be for a specific task - "Look for the best tutorial on the editing package you use" etc.
- Ratings and comments to be against specific rather than generic criteria - For each task, we'll give guidance on what to rate on.
- Forums - Use forums for generic discussion, but also build them up as a place to get help - just like the students can if they continue to work out media making after the course.
- Reputation system - The course is too short to warrant this, but definitely worth thinking about for something longer.
This means that we're writing in January-March for a November course and that feels really tight. By then some aspect of the technology: hardware or software will have moved on, and if we were trying to nail down everything that a student should use with the course, that would feel unlucky - time to start thinking about updating the course if the student numbers warrant it, or to cancel it if they don't. By the expected end of the course (May 2016) we've no way of sensibly predicting what technologies will be in vogue, never mind how the software will look or feel.
So the idea is to throw the job of updating the course over to the students. We'll show them how to research all the things they need and provide them with a place to effectively share and compare resources. If we can effectively bring what they find back into the course we're ahead - well maybe we're keeping up. It all hinges on making doing that kind of research and sharing rewarding enough to be sustained through 10 weeks of study.
One of the things that the whole Web 2.0 fad obscures is that it's easy to do this badly. Looking at Facebook (and seeing as we're here) Blogger, we see things that work. But there must be a long tail of lame almosts that never got the development time or failed to be base on how people work in the first place. There's a lot of description or normative stuff written about it all, but I'm not finding anything too helpful on how to trigger and sustain social learning online.
So suggestions welcome, and in the meantime some ideas are:
- Publicly recognise good behaviour - student of the week kind of thing. We could use the moderators to pick out and thank students who help others resolve issues.
- Open Studio - We're using an OU developed platform called Open Studio for students to catch, tag and share media (including their own projects) or websites. It already has comment facilities, but our fantastic developer Jane is going to add a rating system for us - so students can give each others' finds a rating of between 1 and 5 stars.
- Task driven - each time Open Studio is used, it will be for a specific task - "Look for the best tutorial on the editing package you use" etc.
- Ratings and comments to be against specific rather than generic criteria - For each task, we'll give guidance on what to rate on.
- Forums - Use forums for generic discussion, but also build them up as a place to get help - just like the students can if they continue to work out media making after the course.
- Reputation system - The course is too short to warrant this, but definitely worth thinking about for something longer.
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