Making MOOCs Work For You
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What is a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)? And how do you make one work for you? HT2 Solution Architect, Craig Taylor, shares some insider tips for success in this short presentation delivered at the Charity Learning Consortium's Speed Geeking Session in London, 3 September 2015. Find out more about MOOCs and Curatr at http://www.ht2.co.uk.
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Making MOOCs Work For You
- 1. Craig Taylor, Solutions Architect, HT2 03 September 2015 Making MOOCs Work For You Charity Learning Consortium Seminar 2015
- 2. Who has… registered for a MOOC? started a MOOC? completed a MOOC?
- 6. www.ht2.co.uk 2. Optimal video length Three lessons we learned
- 8. Next steps… Identify a MOOC that interests you and enrol - if only to judge for yourself. Find a MOOC that you could offer to your internal stakeholders - then offer it them! Join our ‘How to Create an Outstanding MOOC’ MOOC! http://www.curatr3.com/portfolio-item/how-to-create-an-outstanding-mooc/ Remember - there’s a lot to be learned from MOOCs, even if you’re not offering them yourself.
- 9. LEARNING IS SOCIAL Follow us @HT2Learning Visit us www.ht2.co.uk www.curatr3.com | www.learninglocker.net
Editor's Notes
- If you’ve not heard of a ‘MOOC’ before, it stand for Massive Open Online Course
- One of the issues often reported around MOOCs is the high ‘drop out’ rate associated with them The focus of MOOCs is often on completion rates, on ‘finishing’…. But as people development professionals, we know ‘completion’ is rarely the goal - Change is the goal! Are we guilty of taking old-fashioned definitions of what ‘success’ looks like i.e. finishing, passing, qualifying, graduating, gaining a tick in the box? and applying that traditional perception to a very modern delivery method? MOOCs should be viewed as having a much greater alignment with using the internet to search for information than taking a formal course. Do you ‘drop out’ of watching a video on YouTube? Do you ‘drop out’ of reading a Wikipedia entry? Do you ‘drop out’ of listening to a podcast?
- We’ve designed, co-designed and facilitated hundreds of MOOCs and have learned lots of lessons along the way.
- “You can never level up enough early on in the game” Sid Meier As a general rule, you are looking to start off easy, letting the learner level up quickly without too much effort. This gets learners into the swing of things and allows them to make fast progress - thus increasing their confidence.
- We recently performed a large scale analysis of our own MOOCs to try and discover what was the right length of time for video content presented in Curatr. We classified video content into two broad categories; short content (less than 4 mins in length) and long content (8 mins or more). Using data collected by our LRS (Learning Locker), we then performed an analysis to suggest how long users stayed on each object (dwell time). What we saw was clear: When content is less than 4 mins in length, users tend to stay for over 9 minutes. During this time they watch the video, read some comments, vote a bit and then add their own thoughts. When the video is 8 mins or longer, the average dwell time is just 37 seconds. That’s enough time to start the video, realise you aren’t going to finish watching it and quit out. Our MOOCs are voluntary and perhaps they attract a fickle learner as there’s no big ‘end goal’. However, the evidence here is backed up by evidence from EdX. Short videos are best for engagement and when we say short, we mean really short, 4 minutes or less. We suspect even shorter would be better…
- When we design a MOOC, we like to ‘Think In Thirds’. Curatr is designed to let you source content from wherever you find it. By presenting a unified interface to content, your experience will seem more coherent and better structured, even if the content production itself is very different. The first third of content tends to be linking to other systems/platforms owned by the business. This can be an LMS, a document management system, an intranet page, the public-facing website etc. You will have internal Intellectual Property that can be re-used and by linking to it where it is already uploaded, you save on version control headaches. You’re first priority should always to curate content from your organisation. The next third tends to come from the wider world. Here you can expand to look at popular content sharing websites (YouTube, TED Wikipedia, blogs etc). There is a world of rich content on the Internet, just waiting for you to tap into it. Where possible, before making something new yourself, look to see if it can be sourced externally (hopefully, for free). The final third of content it is likely you will need to upload directly into Curatr. This might be because it has no other digital home, or it might be because you need to create some new content to round out the experience. It tends to be that this content can be used to ‘glue’ the experience together; giving your learners some specific context or examples that might not be found elsewhere in the organisation or the wider world. Our ‘thirds’ approach is obviously only a rough guide, but it tends to be accurate enough in most circumstances. The less you commit to building new, the quicker you will be able to get up and running. Remember, this is a social learning experience. Content doesn’t have to be perfect. The real insights will be built in response to content, not merely as a result of watching something.