Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained momentum in recent years and offer a new opportunity for interaction with potential university students. While MOOCs have been seen as a disruptive force for higher education, they have provided spaces to explore innovative approaches and emerging technologies that can then be integrated into regular university course content. Designing courses that are not aligned with any accreditation requirements has
allowed the flexibility to creatively experiment and push boundaries. Using Blackboard’s Open Education platform, Charles Darwin University has developed and delivered 3 MOOCs showcasing creative approaches to otherwise traditional course content.
This presentation will showcase CDU’s processes, innovative approaches, and lessons learnt. As a bonus, you will also see inside the Memory MOOC’s visually stunning “Memory Palace” and see how learning Accounting was brought to life through interactive video and branching scenarios in the “Who’s Counting” MOOC.
5. The Innovative Media Production Studio
5
-IMPS!
We create innovative, interactive learning resources developed specifically
for the online environment through 3D animation, 3D modeling, video, web
design, web programming and game design solutions.
6. “Making a MOOC is like moving a mountain.”
~Arie K. DenBoom , Coordinator of the first
University of Amsterdam MOOC
6
7. 7
The MOOC Team that Moved 3 Mountains
• Team Leader- Alison Lockley
• Business Manager- Helen Rysavy
• MOOC Coordinator- Karin Pfister
• 3D Animator, Multimedia, Video Production-
Dan Hartney
• Sound Technician - Jack Tinapple
• Web Programmer - Matt Elvey
• Video Editing – Erin Lawson, Paula Wilson
• Subject Matter Experts, Course Authors
• OLT Team Member- Learning Design
8. 8
Overcoming Roadblocks and Challenges…
• Doubts/ concerns from faculty
about the benefits of providing
a free learning experience
• Securing a budget to promote
and market the MOOCs
• Prioritising the time required to
develop the content
• Language barriers with collaborators
(Accounting MOOC)
9. 9
ADDIE and SAM- Instructional Design
ADDIE
Analysis
Design
Development
Implementation
Evaluation
SAM
Successive
Approximation
Model
10. 10
The Making of a MOOC
• Benchmarking
• Brainstorming
• Concept Design
• Prototyping
• Review
• Design Iterations
• Production Meetings
• Testing
• Troubleshooting
• …........
25. 25
Evaluation and Reporting
Tools used:
• Open Ed Analytics and Reports
• Google Analytics
• Google Forms
• YouTube Analytics
• Social Media Analytics
• Sharestream Analytics
26. 26
Space to Innovate – Blackboard’s Open Education Platform
Leveraging:
• flexibility
• interactivity
• expertise
27. 27
Leveraging Expertise
Charles Darwin MOOC
Peter and Rosemary Grant, Princeton
Jonas Von Essen, Memory MOOC Alex Malley, Accounting MOOC
Dr. Simon Moss, Associate Prof Psychology Prof Stephen Garnett, Charles Darwin MOOC
44. 47
Opportunities for innovation in the MOOC Space
• Increase and enhance resources for direct integration into regular university courses
• Lecturers gain knowledge and skills on what is possible in the BB platform
• Enhance lecturers’ knowledge of cutting edge technologies
• Enhance outreach and visibility on a national and global stage
• Experiment with innovative approaches and technologies
• A new way of attracting and interacting with potential students
• Establish your university as a participant in the Open Access movement
• Partnerships and collaboration within and beyond your organisation
• Opens pathways for RPL
Hinweis der Redaktion
Hello everyone! A little bit about myself to begin with. My name is .. And I work as the OER Coordinator, which includes MOOCs, at Charles Darwin University. The purpose of my session today is to showcase some of the innovative learning experiences that we have experimented with through our MOOCs, share with your our lessons learnt through this journey, and hopefully you will feel inspired to try some of these innovative approaches in your online learning environments.
I work as part of a team in the Innovative Media Production Studio – (click) “IMPS” yes that’s right, we are a bunch of imps- but we do pretty well for being a team of imps as we create…..(click) We get to work in this inspiring space (cick) that includes a green screen room, sound room and work spaces desiged to encourage creativity and collaboration. If you want to see more about us and our work space (click) here is a QR code you can scan.
So, in addition to creating resources for regular courses, our team was tasked back in 2013 with creating CDU’s first MOOC. Now who here works at a University or organisatino that has created a MOOC? Who has worked on developing a MOOC? Has anyone ever participated in a MOOC? Well.... It was exciting, but we soon learned….
Through the design, development and delivery of three very unique MOOCs, our team gained extensive knowledge, skills and appreciation for what goes into the making of impressive, innovative, award winning MOOCs. Though all three were vastly different in approach, the common brief was that they must be:
Innovative and First of their kind
Highly engaging
Push the boundaries of what is possible
Be comprised of primarily original material and content
Basically we had a team of 9-10 people working on our MOOCs with varying levels of involvement. Keep in mind we were developing the MOOCs, sometimes more than one at a time, in addition to all of the other projects we were meant to be working on for internal core units at the University. In developing the MOOCs, the team made a conscious decision to create mot of our own original content. This decision was based on several factors, including the desire to create MOOCs with our own unique style and pespective, issues with the us of existing content under Australia copyright law and the need for a range of interactive resources that were not readily available or did not exist. Creating our own content enabled the repurposing and integration of resources into existing credit-bearing units.
Now before I get too far into this presentation, I want to be sure that I address your curiosities during our time together- so are there any questions you have upfront – I want to be sure that I don’t go on an on about things you are not interested in and make sure I hit the mark to address the reasons you came to this session. (Write Q’s on whiteboard or butcher paper to be sure I address later…)
So sometimes it felt a bit like this, with crocodiles swimming around us… It was easy to get bogged down in the enormity of what we were doing.... Some of these challenges included (Click)
These challenges were overcmoe through patience and persistence.
So, with our friends ADDIE and SAM… we began the journey... Creating 3 MOOCs in 3 years.
The process ended up looking a little like this… (the prototype, review, design iterations here in the middle) In the initial concept meeting or meetings, we brainstorm and come up with lots of crazy ideas of what we want the MOOC to look and feel like. Prior to this meeting I will have done some benchmarking, seeing what already exists.
So, let’s begin- After the initial concept meeting with the entire team, the SME would write the content, .then submit for review to a head of school, when it’s been approved and gets submitted to me, and it looks something like this. We’ve all seen it, traditional Word docs, PDF’s – textbook material. NOT MOOC-ISH at all….
So I begin my magic MOOCIFYING PROCESS…. I take the raw content and start doing something like this… imagining what would be good as a video, what is suited to a tutorial, or an interactive, or a branching scenario...
Now some of the digital media we create will require storyboarding, especially for our Storylines or Branched scenarios…I sometimes sketch this out by hand or do it electronically in a PP, as long as you are communicating the visual aspects, the interactions and any scripting or links that will be included.... At this stage we begin to have weekly or every other weekly production meetings wtih the subject matter experts- they are very much a part of each step of the development stage.
If a video is needed, it needs to be scripted with all visual descriptions as well as the narrative, to take it from this to (click) this.
Creating video is definitely the most costly and time-consuming way to present the content, but we have all the equipment needed for creating high end, quality professional video and we experimented with different types and formats of video content, learning a lot along the way about what hits the mark for optimal learning…. We have learned that short and sharp videos are best – ideally around the 3 min mark or less.
In our greenscreen room we will have an actor, or sometimes just a nonqualified team member like myself– the actor will learn their lines and be directed by our video production team, and then Dan our magic man will design amazing settings and backgrounds for the final cut. Being a video animator comes in handy for some of the crazy ideas the team comes up with to portray dry content like “The Accounting Cycle”
So you can see here that having the skills in the team to create dynamic, engaging video comes in handy… and we have a lot of fun in the process....
During our testing phase we utilised on campus students, staff, h.s. students, chinese students etc. who came into our studio to do live testing under observation- cannot stress the importance of this enough as we learned so many things that we wouldn’t have known otherwise. We used a variety of methods for each of the MOOCs, including Google forms, paper based forms and of course observation and discussion as the testers worked through the MOOCs.
You can see from these results from two MOOCs we launched, the MOOC listing is where most MOOC participants go to find out what MOOCs are on offer- so I make sure I get our MOOCs listed early in these places.
Having an active Social Media campaign is desirable for your MOOC promotion- we have found that a week before launch date is a good time to start posting and then continue throughout the entire MOOC. We used FB and Twitter accounts to promote.. CDU accounts plus individual schools set up FB pages for discussions and sharing. We also have various budgets that were used for Google Ads, FB Ads, etc.
During our MOOC delivery we were sometimes running the live webinars, moderating discussion boards, or answering emails sent to our MOOCs inbox. WE have experimented with different delivery timeframes, from as little as 4 weeks to as long as 10 weeks. We pretty much run all MOOCs now around the 6-8 week delivery timeframe as we found from experience that this seems to work the best.
During the MOOC delivery and then after closure, we used a range of tools to collect and interpret diverse data on access, activity/ engagement including the reports and analytics tools available from Open Education as well as Google analytics, surveys, Google Forms, YouTube analytics and even Social media analytics. After each MOOC running I create a report that collates, synthesizes and interprets the data from these analytics tools.
We chose to host our MOOCs on Blackboard’s Open Education platform for a number of reasons:
Since our university is already a BB client, it was free- as opposed to a very large cost involved in utilizing other platforms
It was a familiar platform for our lecturers to use, easy for them to get in there on the discussion boards, make announcements and build content when needed.
It was a familiar environment for our students who were taking the MOOCs, or any potential students who may then become enrolled at CDU.
The resources developed for the MOOCs could easily be used in our other courses, and we would have the experienced any complexities or nuances of adapting them for full functionality in this platform.
Troubleshooting and help, fully supported by the BB Open Ed team- who have been wonderful and highly prompt in their responses.
Allowed open authentication and self-enrolment.
Part of the purpose of today’s talk is to showcase how we have used MOOCs as spaces to experiment with innovative technologies and how you might use this to gain ideas for leveraging interactivity and the Blackboard LMS to improve teaching and learning in your own online space.
Since our MOOCs are not aligned with any particular course requirements, this provided a space for more flexibility and allows for creativity to flourish
All of our MOOCs were designed to be “firsts” of their kind- as in- we would benchmark and see what was already out there. And we designed them to leverage this environment (click) flexibility, (click) interactivity, and (click) expertise.. Meaning our digital and educational expertise , as well as bringing in expertise from the outside – (next slide) for example Professor Janet Browne, Charles Darwin Scholar for the CD MOOC webinars
for example Professors Janet Browne from Harvard and Professors Peter and Rosemary Grant from Princeton, Charles Darwin Scholars. They presented in webinars for the MOOC and have guest appearances in the MOOC Jonas Von Essen, Two time World Memory Champion, hosted our Memory MOOC, and Alex Malley CEO of CPA Australia makes a guest appearance in the Accounting MOOC.
It’s worthwhile to consider how you can bring in world experts to make your content come alive, whether that be in video form, video conferencing with the class over Skype or collaborate in which you can put the recording into your course, social media interactions, etc.
Wherever possible, when the content lends itself to be interactive, I try to envision how the learner has to physically DO something with the content to create a more active rather than passive learning environment. For example, fill in an income statement, explore what happens to assets, equity and liabilities via a slider interactive, or virtually “listen” to what several pseudo accountants have to say about a how to record a company paying off a debt, and then deciding who is correct. Rather than passively reading what they each have to say, the learner has to physically explore their views and then make a decision. (go to this interactive). We can even lose learners attention during a video so adding in a question here and there that the learner must answer to continue is handy.
We can even lose learners attention during a video so adding in a question here and there fot the learner to answer to continue is handy.
We have created Programmed branching scenarios (as in our Remote Sensing project for environmental studies) or we can create branching scenarios utilising Storyline software that anyone on the team can create without having to be a programmer. Storyline integrates nicely into the Open Ed platform. You can play around a bit more with gamifying content in storyline by adding choices, progress bars, and characters.
The integration of Storyline into the Open Education platform also lends itself to adding in more gaming elements to your course, so we experimented with (click through)
From those participants who responded, on average around 38% stated that earning a badge was an important motivator for them to complete the course. This percentage was as high as 67% for our first MOOC and as low as 20% in our Memory MOOC.
Our team has been experimenting with virtual reality and 360 degree panoramas, especially for our Virtual Health Precinct project in which we have virtual labs. Inside these panoramas there are hotspots that when clicked bring up video scenarios, tutorials or tasks to complete. (Let’s have a look inside- cut to tab open inside Lab)
This has been very effective for external students, who often miss out on the face to face lab exercises or field studies, and can now conduct experiments or sampling virtually. We used the Memory MOOC to test out some of the capabilities of what might be possible.
Our first MOOC… has been run three times as well with over 800 participants. This MOOC won Blackboard’s exemplary course award, Director’s choice (wording..) The first two times it was run “live” as in, live discussion boards and live webinars. The third time we ran it without the webinars and no live discussion board. This decision was based on availability of human resources to run the course live. This MOOC was developed to leverage the Charles Darwin University’s namesake and showcase CDU’s stellar environmental research. It was initiated by executive. Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive- and many commented on the personal, warm approach of this MOOC, like they felt they were in the room with the experts.
Let’s have a look inside. This MOOC is jam- packed with content. Let’s look at some of the lovely video work (look at intro to course vid with Steve Reynolds) and then the Finches Interactive, Part 2 content, Galapagos Finches.
This MOOC was an experimental collaborative project between CDU and its Chinese partner Anhui Normal University. This MOOC had some unique objectives, including
To promote Accounting as an exciting career choice and attract students to study accounting at CDU
To promote CDU among potential students in China
To fill a need that existed globally for high quality fun interactive online learning in the field of Accounting
To trial working collaboratively with our Chinese partner university
Innovation objectives- to experiment with scenario based learning, characters, branching in storyline
(click) This MOOC was an executive initiated project as opposed to a faculty or school initiative like the other two MOOCs. It has been run twice and is currently open if anyone would like to enrol- Open until September 27.
Go into platform and show cycling video in Module 1 Part 3 (first video)
So as you have experienced and seen now, all three of our MOOCs were very different, initiated in different ways, designed in vastly different ways, with completely different purposes and outcomes. This has provided our team and university a unique perspective on this type of Open Learning and MOOCs in particular.
We had some really really great ideas along the journeys, or what we thought were great ideas….. From putting our Memory MOOC champion into the Cage of Death to memorise material under pressure, (that was a great idea!) to ... Pub/ memorising drink orders, which ended up here in our banishment room of good ideas gone bad....
We hired a translation company …. Found out later we had the expertise in house... Had students and lecturers check translations and make amendments. Could have saved a lot of money by paying students to do the translation work and with better, more contextual results. Time and support for language checking .....
Be Agile: regular production meetings with SMEs, target audience, stakeholders, etc. This provides the client with plenty of opportunities to provide important feedback early on. This will also minimise the amount of re-work or changes that will need to be done.
Working with collaborators who do not speak English and are from very different cultural backgrounds can be very difficult and time-consuming- so be prepared for miscommunications, misunderstandings and delayed problem solving! Written and verbal comms between all stakeholders is so important. We used project wikis to communicate and keep track of all aspects of the projects.
No beta testing role available in the Open Ed platform so our work around was to open a course temporarily but not publish it to the Open Ed catalog, and put a big announcement on the landing page that the course was only open temporarily for testing…. We found that the Preview mode does not give accurate performance results.
MOOC engagement spikes after an announcement is sent out in emails with a link to the course- but don’t send out too many. We found that one on the opening day, one half way through and then one a few days before closing (with a reminder to fill in the course feedback) seems to work well.
We were hoping to gain all kinds of information from our participants but we found that very few were taking the time to fill in the feedback. In our first running of our first mooc there was a pre-course survey and a course feedback. We have gotten much better results by putting a google form with two questions on the landing page. We are finding that almost all participants will quickly fil this in- no extra clicking to go through to get to the survey and it’s quick and painless- we ask “How did you hear bout this course?” and What are your goals/ reasons for enrolling in the course.
We used to ask what country they were from but then found that this information is available via the Open Education Admin panel on “Download enrolment data”
And a major lesson learnt is you need a cohesive, energetic, synergetic, creative team- so positive team building activities built into your work processes go a long way to preserve the momentum and morale as you work through a major project like a MOOC.
So you wonder, all this work and money, What benefit are MOOCs to the University which has heavily invested resources into their creation?
A common benefit of all three MOOCs for CDU was the knowledge and skills gained by our team and the lecturers we worked with in seeing what was possible in the Blackboard platform. This resulted in all three cases in enhanced resources for direct integration into regular university courses, lifting the standard for many of our online courses.
Another residual benefit was the effect that the development of these MOOCs had on the SME, our residential lecturers. By being interwoven and directly involved in each step of the design, development and delivery processes, they gained a deeper understanding of the content an and increased proficiency in the features and potential of the BB learning platform that they use for their regular olnine courses. They also gained an enhanced knowledge of cutting edge technologies, which enabled them to envision and employ these technologies into their courses. Word also spreads among staff and now we have many other courses utilising similar strategies, tools and high end resources for their courses.