wikey
commented
5 years ago Given the number of potential audiences for this material and the different goals some of those audiences will have for participating in the MOOC, one option is to look at a hybrid MOOC where we work with a collection of schools and other institutions that want to set up local study groups, workshop series, hackdays, etc as ways of participating in the MOOC. In that distributed model the central MOOC becomes the shared curriculum while the direct interactions are mostly moved towards sources of support and advice close to the user. This is the model advocated for by the P2PU folks after their experiments with self-run MOOCs.
One of the biggest advantages of this sort of model is that it opens the first run of the MOOC up to experimentation and the use of multiple formats to reach multiple audiences. Groups that are already introducing Python/R/git are going to have a very different take on Open Collaboration than folks who have never seen the command line. Other groups are going to be able to get a lot from the Open Data and Open Access sections even while still using point and click analysis tools. These groups may even have different products at the end of their participation: a github DOI of project files in one case, a certificate of training completion from the university's Teaching and Learning center in the other. Whichever of those groups you happen to be in, the other group members and the people organizing that group are probably the most likely places to get support on additional MOOC topics not covered by your particular group events or with general open science support after the MOOC ends.
I think we could productively combine this sort of strategy with the general communication one by running a MOOC pilot where we reach out to trainers, librarians, open science ambassadors, software carpentry instructors, and others we know at institutions who are doing this kind of work.
During that trainer pilot we would ask the trainers to:
a. go through the material,
b. help improve 1+ section of it,
c. design an event template for the crowd they normally work with using some of the material from the
MOOC, and
d. (optionally) plan/publicize a schedule of local events to assist individuals on campus who want to
participate in the general MOOC.
That way we spread the word about the MOOC, get additional expert feedback on the material, generate a set of ideas for how to present the material in a local setting, and get some people on the calendar running these sorts of events during the time frame when the global MOOC will first run.
Protohedgehog
BieTanjade
jgmac1106
Once all the content is drafted and the platform is selected, there is the question of how we are going to directly interact with course participants. What kind of interactions do we anticipate between participants and those running the course, who is going to have those interactions, and how do we support those interactions at scale if we get 100, 1000, or 10000 participants?
This includes any role course operators are supposed to play in re/viewing the work that students do as part of the module assignments and any efforts to support students who are having trouble.
Starting this as an issue because there are so many different ways to approach the issue. If there is already an agreed upon plan for this then it may just need to be surfaced so that new participants coming to the project can see those as options for how to contribute time/effort.