A Tale of Four MOOCs

Although it's probably not fair to call the Janux History of Science course a MOOC, it's clear that Janux aspires to offer MOOCs (as in the beer course), so I'll include it here in this list of my four MOOCs.

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Instructional Ideas and Technology Tools for Online Success (no university sponsor). This was a MOOC taught by Curtis Bonk (of Indiana University) on the Blackboard CourseSites platform in May of 2012. It was my first MOOC, and I only completed a few weeks of the course. Admittedly, I was not the right student for the class; it was aimed at K-12 instructors not already using the Internet. I was curious about Blackboard CourseSites, however, which proved to be very disappointing in every way. The most memorable experience for me was a discussion that took place at Lisa Lane's blog (always a great place for discussion) in which some people from Blackboard also participated, along with Curtis Bonk, the course instructor. Note that such a discussion could never really have happened inside CourseSites itself; we needed an open space, like Lisa's blog, for that to happen. I did not create a dedicated blog of my own for the class, but this Google+ post provides a good summary of my experience.

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Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World (Univ. of Michigan). This was a MOOC taught by Eric Rabkin on the Coursera platform; I participated in the first iteration of the class during summer/fall of 2012. I completed the full ten weeks of the course, but my initial eagerness was gone after just a week or two. Overall, I would rate the course a disaster. I read some good books and made some good friends, but I also developed an antipathy to MOOCs that I doubt I will ever fully get over. I blogged about the experience in detail at my Coursera Fantasy blog, and there were also lengthy discussions at Google+ among the course participants who connected with one another there. The course claimed to be the online equivalent of one of Eric Rabkin's undergraduate course at Michigan, and it seems that at least some of the features of his campus-based classes also haunted the MOOC version. Based largely on my experiences in that class, I wrote an article about the Coursera software, "Fifty Ways to Fix the Software," that will be coming out soon in a book about MOOCs edited by Steve Krause and Charlie Lowe, Invasion of the MOOCs: The Promises and Perils of Massive Online Open Courses (Parlor Press). The book will be CC-licensed, which is why I participated in the project: the book really is open, even if many so-called MOOCs are often not very open at all. (On MOOCs and openwashing, see Audrey Watters on "The Battle for Open.")

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Designing a New Learning Environment (Stanford). This was a course taught by Paul Kim on the NovoEd (then called VentureLab) platform in the fall of 2012. I completed this MOOC, and overall it was a very positive experience. The course was not really the equivalent of a college course; instead, it was more like an ongoing professional development workshop for educators and educational technologists, and I was exactly the kind of student that the course anticipated. Participation in the class was very international, and I made some good new friends in this course from many different countries, people with whom I am still in touch at Google+ and Twitter. The software was not great, but it was good enough, especially compared to the Coursera software. In particular, NovoEd offered a blogging tool so that our blogs were both public on the Internet while also being integrated into the NovoEd system. We had teams, too, and the teams also had blogs. While I would have preferred a more truly open course (something like ds106), the programmers at NovoEd were making a real effort to build a community space that was not entirely cut off from the rest of the digital world.

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History of Science to the Age of Newton (Univ. of Oklahoma). This is the course taught by Kerry Magruder on the Janux platform that I have been blogging about here. Sadly, while this course had the best content of the four MOOCs I have participated in, the Janux software has made it impossible for me to continue. I am very disappointed that the programmers at NextThought did not take the best of the MOOC software out there (ds106, gRSShopper, NovoEd, etc.) and build on that to create something excellent. Instead, they have created something that does not seem to work well at any scale, small or massive. For details, see the posts labeled "diary" in this blog.