Five Aha! Moments While Taking a MOOC...this presentation shares some of my observations on taking a "Crash Course on Creativity" taught by Tina Seelig at Stanford University's Venture Lab.
There was a group of us here at Apollo who signed up together to try out a MOOC offered by Stanford University called Designing a New Learning Environment.I was eager to check out this MOOC phenomenon so I signed up right away.On my way there, I ran into this course…
A Crash Course on Creativity taught by Tina SeeligThe blurb for this course taught by Tina Seelig at Stanford said that she could teach you tools and strategies to enhance your creativity. This looked too good to pass up! So, even though I had signed up for Designing a New Learning Environment, I leaped into the Crash Course on Creativity and never looked at Designing a New Learning environment again.
Here are some statistics from another MOOC, but they mirror the drop off rate that we’ve seen across the boards.It’s easy to sign up, and just as easy to drop out. The people who complete the course are a fraction of those who sign up.But looked at another way, it would take a year or more for a professor teaching traditional classes to reach 1,400 people, so this is still large scale, though not quite “Massive”
This Crash Course on Creativity was different from any class I’d taken before. I was really motivated and excited by the subject matter.Also, the lectures were short, pithy and brought up great points. Each week there was a short 3-5 minute online lecture introducing a key concept. Here’s an example of one. http://venture-lab.org/creativity/lectures/3She also had a condensed version of a chapter from her book each week that ran about 2 pages in length.
Even someone like Tina who is really engaging and smart with great things to say has to keep it short to hold your attention. Even the chapters from her book, inGenius, which was a best seller, were condensed for this online presentation. So, what feels like an hour on the Internet is really more like 5 minutes. She rarely strayed from that 5 minute rule for videos.Also, though these videos seem very straightforward, they’re highly produced. She’s written a tight script and is reading it. The graphics and images, though simple are tied to the story and everything flows well. Even her theme music is energizing.The assignments were demanding and many of them required group work. So the next big challenge was forming a group.
Groups could be assigned by the LMS using an algorithm to match you with others based on your ranking and your interests. But I was able to find a group on my own. We were an international team.
The assignments were demanding and many of them require group work. Groups could be assigned by the LMS using an algorithm to match you with others based on your ranking and your interests. But I was able to find a group on my own. We were an international team.
The assignments were demanding and many of them require group work. Groups could be assigned by the LMS using an algorithm to match you with others based on your ranking and your interests. But I was able to find a group on my own. We were an international team.
The assignments were demanding and many of them require group work. Groups could be assigned by the LMS using an algorithm to match you with others based on your ranking and your interests. But I was able to find a group on my own. We were an international team.
The assignments were demanding and many of them require group work. Groups could be assigned by the LMS using an algorithm to match you with others based on your ranking and your interests. But I was able to find a group on my own. We were an international team.
The assignments were demanding and many of them require group work. Groups could be assigned by the LMS using an algorithm to match you with others based on your ranking and your interests. But I was able to find a group on my own. We were an international team.We had a rhythm of how we worked – spent time brainstorming, trying out ideas and refining until we got to something that we all felt we could move ahead with. Then, we set to work dividing up responsibilities and working in parallel.Most of our work took place outside the Coursera platform – We emailed on Gmail – faster and easier than Coursera email. We had many shared Google Docs, We did file transfers using You Send It, We posted and shared on Vimeo and You Tube,
Our first big assignment was a little odd – Take a loaf of bread and reframe it to add value. Note the flicker – format wars on the video.Here’s what we came up with: Roll Video
In the first few weeks of the course, a survey went out asking people to rate themselves on the “Big Five” dimensions.In psychology, the Big Five personality traits are five broad domains or dimensions of personality that are used to describe human personality.To no great surprise, people rated themselves highly on parameters like Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness. They also rated themselves highly for organizational skills, initiative and drive.These survey results are probably skewed in that direction, since people who are conscientious and Open and Agreeable are also probably more likely to take a survey if asked. But the point helped me understand more about who my colleagues in this class were and also led me to Aha moment number 4.
This is no great surprise, but it was certainly validated by survey research and by my personal experience with my group. People who stick with it in MOOCs tend to be well organized and extraverted. My group had several extraverts, and it was very helpful to have their energy and input when brainstorming and getting projects off the ground. It is also true that one member of my group didn’t do a whole lot. So we let him ride on our coat tails because at least he wasn’t obnoxious!
I had planned to spend 1-3 hours per week taking this course. But it was much more demanding than that and I ended up spending about 5 hours per week on it. Plenty of people said they felt overwhelmed by the assignments. The mechanics of the platform, the mechanics of the group work and then the delivery of the finished products was a lot to absorb and manage. Fortunately the course was only 6 weeks long. But what a fantastic 6 weeks! I was really fired up by what I was learning and I was also really excited to be involved with this group of collaborators around the world.And this lead to my final Aha…
One of the main things I learned was that you can learn a lot taking an online MOOC. I have applied a lot of what I learned in my day to day work. We learned tools about observation, brainstorming, reframing, how to engender idea generation and lots of other skills. All of this is extremely applicable and helpful in my day to day work.I thought maybe I was an outlier in feeling this way about the course. But a few weeks ago I ran into a woman who took this course and she had many of the same feelings about it that I did – very enthusiastic! So, this was a success story. I am really glad I took this course. I learned so much and I think many of us here would gain a lot from this. Tina Seelig is teaching this course again starting April 22nd. I encourage you to check it out.