My plan for my open course is to do a course about being open and use other peoples open courses as the content! So I discussed my concepts with a few colleagues and through those conversations it struck me that my idea of open largely involved being online, yet many of them are apprehensive about that.
“I like the idea of open but I don’t feel confident online”
Like many of us in #ccourses I am a confident online navigator. In Mozilla’s eyes I probably traverse their web literacy map nicely but many of my colleagues probably don’t. I was speaking with them about #cccourses and in a couple of cases they just “didn’t get it” and in some cases they were put off by the complexity of joining in (adding your own blog as one example).
So I think I have found my why!
My #ccourse development would need to be more than an open learning experience. I will need to develop it with the ultimate objective of equipping learners to be able to become online open learners (and then perhaps become open online teachers), but I would have to develop a learning experience that also equips them to become web literate. In Mozilla’s web literacy terms I would need them to be able to explore and connect on the web at least, but giving them the confidence to build on the web too.
I have conceived a course that starts as a face to face experience and then moves to a blended experience as participants build confidence. I aim to approach this as being a face to face facilitator of the online experience(s), but eventually moving to a point where all participants become online facilitators of the learning for themselves.
Finding the what & when.
My plan is to use existing online learning activities and support staff in their learning experience through face to face sessions and a (private?) Google+ community for online support. (Our University has Google Apps Edu so all staff have Google accounts).
Using the P2P Course “Community Design 101” I will guide participants through each module of study. The great thing about p2p is that staff can use their Google accounts to sign in (saves having to get them to set up separate accounts).
Google Login – Yippee
This course has 4 main modules and I am planning a Semesters worth (Approx 12 weeks) of activity which will look a bit like this:
- Weeks 1-3: Community Design
- Weeks 4-6: Learning Design
- Weeks 7-9: Feedback & Interactions
- Weeks 10-12: Tools
Within each module there is a set of resources and also a set of activities (projects). The course asks participants to undertake a number of tasks and record these in their “hack pads” as part of the P2P Discourse setup. However instead I am going to initially ask participants locally to undertake these tasks in face to face discussions, with a few to then extending these to the Google+ community.
The reason for this is that many of the colleagues I work with have a lack of online confidence and would be reluctant to engage in activities online, let alone with strangers in an online space. My focus will be to initially establish a local face to face support network, where we meet and discuss the activities and share our thoughts and experiences. Once I have establish this local trust we will then move to some online activity in the Google+ community but still supported by the face to face sessions.
I would hope that by the end of the experience their reliance on the face to face sessions reduces and that staff have been able to progress to being more confident in online spaces.
It would be even better if by the end of the experience they have the confidence to develop something online!!
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