The Emancipation Proclamation MOOC (2013)

Course design

Challenges

• Social constructivism in six-figure classes? (http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/a-tale-of-two-moocs-coursera-divided-by-pedagogy/)
  • Student centered
  • Grading the work
• Managing hundreds or thousands of students
• Mix of students - post-grads, grads, undergrads, secondary school students in same class
  • Teaching 2/3 international - up to 1/3 in other languages (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/06/05/early-demographic-data-hints-what-type-student-takes-mooc)
    • Cultural differences and translations
  • YouTube Auto-Captions with Translation
  • Google Translate

Strategies

• Test early and often (http://phys.org/news/2013-04-online-varying-attention-note-taking-retention.html)
• Peer evaluation (http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/professors-pedagogy-and-moocs/)
• Robo-grading of short essays (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/education/robo-readers-used-to-grade-test-essays.html)
• Select groups to provide instructor feedback/guidance
• "Meet-ups" (http://edudemic.com/2012/10/mooc-meetup-groups/)
• Social media support
• Volunteer tutors (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/education/harvard-asks-alumni-to-donate-time-to-free-online-course.html?hpw&_r=0)

Course Materials

• Copyright
• Libraries working with vast numbers of students who are not licensed for some journal holdings, use of images
• Flickr Commons - http://www.flickr.com/commons
• Library of Congress - http://www.loc.gov/index.html
• New York Public Library Digital Gallery - http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/index.cfm
• Digital Public Library of America - http://dp.la/
  • http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2013/04/12/national-digital-public-library-to-launch/

Marketing Strategy

• University press releases - news outlets, professional organizations
• Social media campaigns - Twitter, Facebook
• The EP MOOC announcements were tied to 150th Anniversary of the EP, the Academy Awards nominations & Black History Month

Technologies

• Selected tools & activities need to be highly scalable - Georgia Tech & Coursera MOOC Stumble
• Student support - if a student has a technical issue, who do they call?
• Data analytics tracing progress - structure course for analytics

Blackboard CourseSites

http://uis.coursesites.com

• Free!
• Familiar to our faculty
• Centralized location for all materials
• Centralized tools (including web conferencing with Collaborate)
• Self-registration through multiple accounts
• Integrated data analytics

Blogs

Wordpress or Blogger are our favorites

Twitter

• Select and share a hashtag for your MOOC so other can find it
• Curate a Twitter Lists of the participants - https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460-using-twitter-lists
• Publish Twitter Newspaper - Paper.li - http://paper.li/

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAoogzkDh5wyD0VzVHfIX4uHb6QHTKGPB

Mozilla Open Badges

http://openbadges.org/