Blog Archive » Confessions of a Massive Open Online Course Flunkie. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from my years spent in pursuit of a Bachelor’s in Education was really quite simple yet profound: “don’t let your class or syllabus get in the way of learning.” Some of you might have heard of it also referred to as the K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) method. You want your students to get in to complex thinking as they are learning the topic of the course, not as they are trying to figure out what to do on the first day. I have signed up for many Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) recently – and never completed a single one.
But the problem is, I just don’t have time to figure out how to use one. At first, I though it was just me. Dave Cormier (how created the video linked to above) gives five steps on how to have success in a MOOC. Of course, I was also one of those people that avoided the massive “lecture hall” courses in college. My biggest confession is that I don’t see the point of a MOOC if I already have a Personal Learning Network.
PLENK 2010: Summary of Week 7-10 – The End. By Stefanie Panke Editor, Social Software in Education I ended my last report from PLENK 2010, the “Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge” course, with the revelation that teaching several classes this semester and being a student in a massive open online course (MOOC) at the same time provided me with some challenges to “manage and balance” – an important competence for the informal learner. The closing line in that report, “my next PLENK review might take a little while,” proved prophetic. This summary of the last four weeks of PLENK is at the same time a resumé of my overall learning experience since last Friday’s web conference was the final curtain for the class.
Week 7: Help for the Information Hoarder! Week seven dealt with tool choices within one’s personal learning environment. We have information flowing at us at such a fast rate that we can’t remember what information we actually want. Week 8: “Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Like this: Interaction in Online Courses: More is NOT Always Better.