It is less than a week now to the start of the Observing and Analysing Performance in Sport SOOC (#OAPS101).
As of this morning we have 134 participants enrolled. I am delighted that so many people are interested in this small open online course (SOOC).
It is intended to be an exploration in open sharing and connecting. I like the idea that this course will be sustained by intrinsic motivation.
We have tried to make participation as easy as possible. Although nominally the course will run through November, all the content for the course will be available when we go live on 5 November.
We think it will be important for participants to look at the Connecting and Sharing Module first in order to appreciate the functionality of the OpenLearning platform but even this is negotiable. Thereafter the course welcomes non-linear participation in the SOOC.
We have no webinars planned in universal time and I see three ways we will connect and share:
1. Discussion forums
2. Video posts
3. Participation portfolios within or beyond the OpenLearning blog and wiki options
We aim to manage the discussion forum as a 24 hour activity each day. Colleagues here in Australia and in the United Kingdom will monitor the discussions. I aim to follow as much of the discussion as I can throughout the course.
I am hopeful that the month will be a great time for produsers … using and producing resources to share under a Creative Commons license.
We have two Open Badges to offer in this course.
Enrolled
* You enrolled for the course.
* You hose a personal path through the material.
* You submitted a summary statement about your experience of the course.
Participant
* You enrolled for the course.
* You chose a personal path through the material.
* You used the OpenLearning tools to contribute to discussion or to comment (karma).
* You developed an e-portfolio to record your involvement in the course and to reflect on your experience of the course.
We hope the distinction between enrollment and participation is reasonable. We think that the participation mode will enable a community of practice to flourish.
Earlier this month I wrote about the kind of atmosphere that we hoped would pervade the course.
Stephen Downes provided me with a timely reminder about this in one of today’s OLDaily posts. In it he observes:
If you were to review my writing on MOOCs and similar phenomena you would see me most frequently refer to (what we would call) ‘students’ as ‘participants’. The term ‘participant’ to me most accurately represents the relation between MOOC and an individual person – they are not ‘students’ because that implies studying and the master-student relationship, which are antithetical to MOOCs. Nor either are they referred to (much) as ‘learners’, as this suggests that learning is the dominant paradigm at work here. In fact, the logic of MOOCs is not the logic of learning, but rather, of participation, and that’s why I use the word.
This is why we use the term participant too in #OAPS101.
Photo Credit
Fireworks
