SOOC 001

I have been thinking about a SOOC, Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport, that will start on 5 November.
It is being hosted by Adam Brimo on the Open Learning platform.
I have a number of colleagues who are volunteering their time to the SOOC and who will be sharing open access resources.
There are lots of conversations about and developments in online courses at the moment and I am grateful that Stephen Downes gives me an OLDaily lead on these.
Part of my musing of late has been about the kind of environment we might create in the SOOC. I have been delighted to discover that others are thinking about these issues too.
I liked Helen Keegan’s approach to a new academic year. In her Not a Mooc post, she observes:

I want to carry on developing our current model-which-has-no-name. I’m not sure what it is – it’s not a MOOC, but it’s certainly pretty open, multi-disciplinary, multi-level and networked, and builds on existing communities of practice and the mentoring that has emerged over the past six years (staff and ex-students -> current students). Most importantly, it’s creative, occasionally anarchic and relatively ad hoc …

 Helen mentioned ds106 in her post. I really enjoy Alan Levine’s posts about ds106. A few days ago he wrote Just ds106.  He noted:

Digital Storytelling (also affectionately known as ds106) is an open, online course that happens at various times throughout the year at the University of Mary Washington… but you can join in whenever you like and leave whenever you need. This course is free to anyone who wants to take it, and the only requirements are a real computer, a hardy internet connection, preferably a domain of your own and some commodity web hosting, and all the creativity you can muster.

ds106 offers advice about becoming an open course participant

First of all, in ds106, there are multiple levels of participation- but most importantly, it is designed so you can pick and choose the when and where. We have a subtle rule of NO APOLOGIES for not being able to participate when other parts of life intrude. There is no concept in ds106 of “dropping out” c.f. Groom, Jim (2010-present), “ds106 is #4life”.

There is an Openness in Education MOOC running at the moment too. The How This Course Works page helped me with my thinking.

Openness in Education is an unusual course. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person. In addition, this course is not conducted in a single place or environment. It is distributed across the web. We will provide some facilities. But we expect your activities to take place all over the internet on blogs, tumblr, Diigo, social network sites, Twitter, and other spaces. We will ask you to visit other people’s web pages, and even to create some of your own. This type of course is called a ‘connectivist’ course and is based on four major types of activity:

  • Aggregate
  • Remix
  • Repurpose
  • Feed forward

I was relieved to read Alec Couros’s discussion of the #unmooc. He concludes his post with these observations:

We are losing the ownership of our own conversations and learning spaces. Though admittedly a grand ambition, I hope that the process of developing an #unmooc, while providing a rich place for learning, can help us become more thoughtful and considerate of our learning spaces and the control of our discourse.

I am delighted that there is lots of discussion about open learning. At the end of a day of musing I am thinking that our SOOC will give us the opportunity to compile some resources to share openly in a non-linear way. I am happy that the S in SOOC enables small numbers of participants. It is a very modest manifestation of connectivist thinking.
I see this as the start of a fascinating journey that might lead to unplugged conversations as well as plugged ones.
Photo Credits
Crowd at the train for the Royal Adelaide Show
Open Window

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