Presentation to a webinar of the Open Distance Learning Association of Australia. There's an MP4 recording of this presentation and two others at https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/playback/artifact?psid=2013-10-30.1257.M.DC6A1EF286808F12D18EB8598CC79A.vcr&aid=57170. More details of the ODLAA 2013 webinar series at http://www.odlaa.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=82&Itemid=109.

1. MOOC on a
shoestring
How a small charity built and ran a ‘massive’ course
This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence.
Please attribute to David Jennings, with contributions from Martin Hawksey and Rachel Harris.

2. Who are ALT & what do they do?
ALT is the UK's leading membership
organisation in the learning technology field.
The Charity’s object is to advance education
through increasing, exploring and
disseminating knowledge in the field of
learning technology for the benefit of the
general public.

3. Context
❖ professional development for people
teaching at Higher Education level
❖ funded by Leadership Foundation in HE
❖ TEL (technology enhanced learning) about
TEL
❖ experiment for ALT designing and delivering
a MOOC
❖ drawing on goodwill of the community

4. Team
❖ CEO, Administrator, Project Manager,
Technical Manager
❖ 11 authors/lead tutors
❖ 20 support tutors
http://octel.alt.ac.uk/about/octel-team/

5. ocTEL in numbers
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10 modules + Induction
11 weeks, 55 hours
1 face-to-face meeting
903 registrations on night before launch
webinar participation from 17 to 102
698 posts on blogs, 1,353 on forums
2 participant-generated communities
more data http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2309/

6. Participants’ locations

7. Course content
❖
❖
❖
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Defining and dividing the curriculum
Templates and examples
Outline, write and review
Final edit
Openly licensed and openly available
resources
❖ Net direct cost £0

8. ALT-C keynotes
ALT wiki
Research in Learning
Technology
ALT Open Access
repository
(ALT-members
discussions)
The ocTEL mixer and distillery
ocTEL

9. Learner support
❖ Crowdsourced from ALT members
❖ FAQs and screencasts
http://octel.alt.ac.uk/help/
❖ Becoming progressively more targeted
❖ Modelling and encouraging learning
behaviours
❖ Net direct cost £0

10. Tech infrastructure
❖ Wordpress + plugins
❖ Course Reader – our one innovation
http://octel.alt.ac.uk/living-and-learning-in-the-open/
❖ Visualisations to help target support
❖ Net direct cost £0

11. cMOOC architecture

12. Challenges & risks
❖ The curse of the good dress rehearsal
❖ Competing with member organisations
❖ Losing the people we depend on
➢ webinar presenters
➢ top fifth percentile of contributors
➢ free tutors
❖ Unforeseen consequences of openness
This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported Licence. Please attribute to David
Jennings, with contributions from Martin Hawksey and Rachel Harris.