#UCSIA15, an open online course in Sport Informatics and Analytics, is three months away.
My colleagues in the Teaching and Learning Centre at the University of Canberra are guiding me through a range of pre-course activities in order to meet the February start of the course.
We have produced a video welcome to the course.
The raw footage was shot using a green chroma key background. My hope was that we would make it very short. The finished video is 38 seconds long.
This is a still from the source video
and this is the edited version:
Leonard Low, the creative producer of the video, has used an image of the Yankee Stadium shared by Ed Yourdon on Flickr with a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.
We have been discussing how ‘open’ we can make this course and how we can use an agnostic range of tools to do so.
One of the resources we will use is an open Moodle Forum. We are hopeful that there will be lots of conversations, probably away from the Forums, but we do want to provide that option.
Students on the Master of High Performance course at the University of Canberra, of which #UCSIA15 is a part, will be developing an ePortfolio to support their learning in the Informatics and Analytics unit. One of the options they have for their ePortfolio is Mahara.
I have started to develop my Mahara example.
My Clyde Street blog is the main item in my ePortfolio and I will ensure I link to Mahara from here.
I have started to make much more use of Google Chrome and have accessed Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides and MindMeister from the Chrome Apps. Much of the course documentation is available in Google Docs format.
I have enjoyed using MindMeister for the ever expanding content of the course.
This is the collapsed version
I am hopeful that Twitter will be a repository for #UCSIA15 activity too.
All these activities have focussed my attention of the learning experience the course might provide. My interest in microlearning has informed my mind mapping and extended my interest in how we acknowledge microlearning that occurs at a learner’s tempo rather than a chronological time model.
By coincidence, earlier this week, Gráinne Conole shared her vision for a Learning Passport. She writes:
The VMPass project is developing an accreditation framework for informal and non-formal learning through resources such as Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC). The accreditation is achieved through completion of a learning passport. This consists of information from: the institution that provided the open learning material, the learner, and the accrediting institution. This document provides guidelines on how to complete the learning passport.
My hope is that any of the micro-learning or macro-learning from #UCSIA15 might appear in this passport, particularly for those people who are combining continuing professional learning with full-time employment in sport.
I wondered if we might attract learners like those discussed by Tim Buszard in The Conversation today. In his discussion of self-taught musicians (with a link to Peter MacIntyre and Gillian Potter‘s work), Tim observed:
those that learned their skills via informal practice were more inclined to write and create music. Indeed, more guitarists than pianists came from informal practice backgrounds.
He followed up with a question that is central to my thinking about the self-organising possibilities of an open online course:
how is it possible that someone can attain such a level of expertise without any teacher providing the necessary instructions and guidance?
This video has given me an opportunity to reflect on the potential of our mirror neurons for personal change (and hip hop virtuosity):
http://youtu.be/ZIoxRO0KlHQ
Imagine #UCSIA15 having that level of engagement and joy.
Still another three months to get our moves sorted out.
