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Tag: Participatory

Participatory Arts MOOC Evaluation and Board

Published 9th August 2017

An Introduction to Participatory Arts – the first presentation of the university’s first MOOC came to a close today. For students it officially ended yesterday, and today the MOOC leader, the principle content developer, and myself met in what was effectively the exam board for the MOOC to assess students’ final submission and award certificates of participation to those who had passed. There were only seven students, out of the 160 or so who were registered, which is a higher than typical non-completion rate for MOOCs, but this was a tough course, MA level content, so we weren’t too displeased. We will be following up with some of the students about the level of content and discussing how we can improve things in future presentations.

For a discussion on non-completion rates on MOOCs, and the reasons why, see this paper from Warwick University (PDF, 473 KB).

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It’s Alive!

Published 26th June 2017

art_mooc

Sunderland’s first MOOC that is, the one that I’ve been helping to develop – Introduction to Participatory Arts and Media. It’s been open for enrolment for a few weeks now, but today is the day the first presentation begins and we have just over 150 students enrolled so far. Exciting times! As well as continuing to provide technical and pedagogic advice and support throughout the duration, I’ll also be doing some TA duties as required.

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Canvas Network Training Course

Published 7th June 2017

In preparation for the Participatory Arts MOOC which I am helping to develop, and which is being hosted on Canvas Network, Instructure asked us to complete this training and preparatory MOOC which, as always happens with MOOCs, I started enthusiastically in early March but was quickly lost amongst the sea of deadlines and urgent jobs.

As the university has chosen Canvas for our new VLE also, this should have given me a head start, but as things panned out I’ve ended up completing all of my onsite Canvas training first. Nevertheless, completing the MOOC was still a valuable exercise as there are some differences with Canvas Network and it did cover pedagogic issues which are specific to MOOCs, such as the types of assessment used and how to stimulate student engagement week on week.

I also earned a couple of badges, Canvas Network Groupie and Canvas Network Rock Star. These were issued through Badgr, another open badge platform which doesn’t link or share my badges to my Mozilla Backpack. I really want to like open badges, I love the concept, but the different platforms need to work with each other; I want to be able to display and collate all of my badges in one place, but the only way I am able to do that is by posting them all on my own website, here, under the Badge tag. The situation screams of the XKCD cartoon Standards.

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