Day 2: Glad I have the books to read... system down?

Okay, here we go! I can already tell this experience is going to renew my empathy with my students who are often getting around to their online class work at the end of a very long day. That is the case for me... but I have vowed to do my half hour every day, so here I am, about to log on to janux.ou.edu on the first official day of the class and see what I can learn! I'm using Safari to do this since I did not have good luck with Chrome over the weekend.

Uh-oh...

Is it server overload? I'm getting an error message. I heard that there were load problems earlier in the day, but I was hoping to be able to log on tonight. Let me try Firefox and see if that makes a difference.

Hmmmm, it looks like I am going to get timed out because it is grinding... and grinding... and grinding... ha ha, which is pretty much how I feel today myself. No luck in Firefox. I'll try Chrome just in case. I get the little green man doing his dance in Chrome, but nothing more:

But I did buy the books this weekend, so I will read for a half hour and hope for better tomorrow! I'm assuming I can't go wrong in reading! :-)

UPDATE: I had a great time reading... and I guess that goes to validate the "all the eggs in one basket" danger of these types of learning management systems which want to be your one and only learning space (something I have very carefully avoided in all my online classes). So, thanks to Kerry's email of Sunday, I had the three class books on my Kindle and I read the opening pages of each one. They were all very stimulating, although I definitely had a clear favorite among them: give me more David Lindberg! The way he began with a consideration of orality and oral ways of thinking was so congenial, and that is a theme I will definitely want to watch for as the class gets under way: how do those oral expressions and oral ways of thinking persist in our own lives  (we are still users of oral language after all!), even as we also acquire new habits of thinking that are indeed foreign to traditional oral cultures...? Man, I love that stuff. Reading Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy was a very momentous event in my own understanding of the world, and so I read the opening pages of Lindberg's book with much pleasure and excitement. I am really looking forward to seeing how these books will relate to the other materials Kerry wants to share with us in the class. Plus, I already have so many ideas for things I would like to study and research as part of this class, questions to answer, things to learn. Especially after having gotten a glimpse of the material in the books, I am very much hoping there will be some kind of class project that we will each be doing and then sharing with the other students.

Meanwhile, I will look for a happier Janux tomorrow!

Day 2: Informative Email!

I received an informative email today about the History of Science class:

Two very important topics here, and I am grateful for the information the email provides:

Time commitment. I already know that I will not be spending 5-7 hours per week on the class. As I explained in my first post, I really cannot afford to spend more than about 3 hours per week. I hope some information will be forthcoming about what people should do if they know in advance that their time commitment is limited: Are we still welcome to participate in the class? And are there suggestions about how we should devote the limited time we have available? In a regular class, a teacher can set expectations for time commitment from their students (in fact, that is essential - especially in an online class; here's my message about time commitment for my students), but in an open class like this one, time commitment is obviously something that is driven by student choice than by requirements in a traditional sense. The more guidance we can get from the instructor, the better! I hope for guidance about how best to spend my limited time as the class gets started. 

Recommended books. The email lists information about print editions, but I was really relieved that there are also ebook versions available... both for convenience and at a cheaper price! The Kindle edition of Lindberg's book is only $9.99, and the Osler book is much cheaper in Kindle also (just $13.99), so that's good news - the prices in the email were discouraging, but I can cope with Kindle prices. And I am so glad all three books are available as ebooks. My guess is that for students in an e-course like this, the ebook options are probably highly desirable, especially now that the Amazon Kindle Cloud reader makes it possible to read Kindle books in any browser, plus all the various devices which have Kindle apps. In the MOOCs I've taken before, with an international audience, ebooks were much preferred, esp. because of shipping issues. 

Just speaking for myself, I do not learn well from videos; I learn much better from reading texts. So... I am going to buy these books! I'll call it a late Christmas present to myself. I'm really glad that all three books are available in Kindle since that is definitely what I prefer (BIG FONTS make me happy, hopelessly nearsighted person that I am).

I also feel obliged to comment that these books really challenge the "walled garden" approach of the Janux platform. It would be one thing if ALL the learning materials really were "in there" (in the form of videos, PDFs, etc.). But if we ARE going outside the platform to do our learning (reading books, looking at websites), then why all the emphasis on Janux being closed off, with all the discussions taking place inside the platform? I for one plan to be blogging about the course, especially since I will be reading these books which are on a platform - Amazon Kindle - that is outside the Janux platform. Anyway, we'll see how all that goes. I cannot imagine taking a course without blogging about it, and I cannot think of a single reason why I would want to make that blog private. But is there an aggregator in Janux to pull in discussions from outside, gathering blog posts and other social media mentions? I didn't see anything at all like that when I checked out a couple of courses last fall; maybe they have added that to the current version of the software.

Meanwhile, I'm hopeful that by reading the books, I'll make enough progress just with my 3 hours per week of time that I'll be able to participate in the class! Most of all, I really appreciated this informative email; poor communication was a very serious problem in the MOOCs I have done elsewhere, but this was a very good way to get us ready for tomorrow.

Still no hashtag for the course for those of us who want to use blogs and other social networking tools to share about the class, so when I go crosspost this over at G+ and Twitter, I guess I'll say #janux and #januxhsci and #ouhistoryofscience. Maybe a specifically recommended hashtag will be forthcoming... Kerry, are you reading this? We need a hashtag! :-)

Day 1: Starting with questions

After reading my friend Kerry's blog post about the Janux History of Science class launch, I decided I would enroll and give it a try. I do this with some trepidation because my past three experiences with MOOCs were very frustrating; I saw so much missed opportunity as a result of both poor course design and poor software design too.

At the same time, I feel obligated to give at least one of the Janux MOOCs a try, if only because my school has invested close to a million dollars in the software alone (see bottom of this post), in addition to the considerable costs involved in creating each course (you can get a sense of that from reading Kerry's post). My first impression of Janux from just logging on and looking around last fall was not good, even compared to the MOOC platforms I have participated in previously (Blackboard CourseSites, Coursera, and NovoEd/VenureLab). But I am going to give it another try, and I will be using this blog to record my experience.

So, after reading Kerry's blog post yesterday, I went to janux.ou.edu to sign up. Because I had previously enrolled in two courses to explore last fall, Janux plunked me inside the course I had last visited and it took me a solid five minutes to figure out how to get out of that course in order to reach the Janux homepage where I could enroll in Kerry's course. I would really like to unenroll from the two courses I was testing in the fall, but I cannot figure out how to do that. I'll worry about that later!

When I did reach the main screen that lists available courses, I clicked on Kerry's course to enroll. The course begins on Monday, January 13, so it is not open yet, but I did get an email welcoming me to the course. Since that is my first experience of the course so far, I've pasted in a screenshot of the email, with my thoughts and questions below.

The first paragraph explains that this is a public version of an existing OU course and, since I am familiar with that existing course, I am very curious what will happen to it in the Janux space. Kerry and I first developed our online courses together over 10 years ago, and we used a very similar course design at that time: weekly readings with students writing in response to those readings, along with a semester-long student project based on a topic of each student's choice. I've carried on teaching my online courses using that same model for all these years; you can see my courses here, and past student projects here. The student projects are the most important part of my courses, and one of my biggest disappointments with many of the MOOCs I have seen is that they focus on top-down content delivery rather than student content creation and the sharing of that student-created content. Will Kerry's Janux course have a strong emphasis on student projects as his previous version of the course did? That is one of the questions I am most curious about!

The next paragraph is hype, and after being subjected to a continuous barrage of hype from all sorts of MOOC providers over the past year and half, I am not impressed by the hype. "One-of-a-kind learning experience" ... "true learning community" ... that's hype. So, no comment.

The third paragraph gets at what is the biggest problem for me here with Janux, so I will quote it here in full: "Feel free to spread the word around about the course by forwarding this email or sharing about it through social media. Encourage your friends to join, add them as a friend, and then form a study group on the platform" (bolding is mine). In other words, the idea is not that people should form learning communities at other social networking sites, nope, don't do that. Instead, we are supposed to join Janux and create our study groups on the platform. I personally have no inclination at all to do that because it means the learning that I want to share will NOT be shared with my friends who decline (understandably) to participate in the course. There are hundreds of people I interact with at Google+ with whom I share the things I learn, and from whom I am likewise learning new things every day. The reciprocity of my learning community at Google+ is something I am really committed to, and I would gladly take what I am learning in this History of Science class and share that at Google+, connecting with other people at Google+ who are enrolled in the class (but we'd need a hashtag to do that... no hashtag was supplied), as well as connecting with people I know there who are not enrolled in the class but who would be very interested indeed to learn along with me.

So, since I am being not just asked but required to pour my time and energy into a closed-off space, a black hole of learning which is disconnected from my existing learning communities both at Google+ and Twitter (and, yep, I would say those are "true" learning communities, too), I am very reluctant to over-invest. To cope with that, I will set a strict time limit of 30 minutes per day on this course. If it were integrated with the learning communities I am already part of, I could see spending more time. But 30 minutes spent at Janux is 30 minutes spent away from the learning communities that already work very well for me. This blog at least is public, but I guess it will be the only public evidence of my Janux learning experience.

And will 30 minutes per day be enough? I have all kinds of questions like that, basic questions about course operations. The email does not go into details; the remaining paragraph is one about how to enroll in the class for credit, but I know that Kerry's for-credit version of the class filled up long ago during regular enrollment; I imagine some people will feel frustrated to find out that they cannot enroll, despite what the email says.

Let me see if I can find more information at the class page on Janux. Hmmmm, I suspect loading problems; here is a screenshot of what happens when I log on. Probably as a result of all the publicity about the courses starting up Monday they are having some overload problems. I'd sure like to find a syllabus or FAQs about the course to get a sense of the time commitment that is expected, along with answers to some other questions.

I pressed refresh, and I saw a brief glimpse of the class page but then it went white again. I'll go try in another browser (I'm using Chrome right now), but I may let the overload problem end my session for today, checking in again this weekend to see if I can get some more answers!

Aha, doing much better in Safari; maybe it is a Chrome problem. I see my friend Kerry when I log on in Safari.

And look: Kerry's blog post gives me the YouTube version so I can embed it here! My opinion of Janux will go up CONSIDERABLY if these videos are all going to be available at YouTube after all (I wouldn't have guessed that from the version inside the Janux platform). So here is the video, thanks to the YouTube version I found in Kerry's blog (three cheers for blogs!) - there's no embed code at the Janux course page itself:

I can't tell just how much time will be required, and it looks like they have not updated the start date (undefined NaN, 0NaN), but I know from the email and Kerry's blog that it starts on Monday:

I'm looking for something like a syllabus with more information about the class, but apparently that is not available.

And my half hour is now up anyway! I'll just close by way of contrast with the information available about my courses to anyone who is curious - students who are enrolled or anybody at all; both classes have an Orientation Week to make sure the students understand the software we will be using and what the courses entail. Will I see an orientation of some kind when I log on to Janux on Monday? I hope so. I'll find out on Monday I guess.

---

September 2013 Regents Final Agenda