Course Feedback–we need more!

After producing all the works you see here in this blog, I lost interest to follow the course schedule without any personal feedback from instructors or other participants; It just becomes another project. Below is the feedback I supplied to the discussion forum. If you have the necessary permissions you should be able to find the original and the seven comments I received–seven comments following the first comment which, as it is easy to do, was an original post mistakenly attached to mine. Sigh.

I signed up for the course, because the intro video promised a collaborative experience. Not receiving any Zero, None, Zip, Nada, Zilch feedback through the course lead me to imagine myself a proverbial Ephraimite, despite the instructor’s insistence SCP could be applied to a wide variety of situations.

I enjoyed the content, videos, webinars, and questions from fellow students. But with zero engagement, I simply lost interest in the course’s community.

Another Edx course focused on Peer Learning While taking SCP, I was also taking a course called “LINK5.10x Data, Analytics, and Learning” (what the participants referred to as DALMOOC) where the course’s entire structure was focused on peer learning. This course follows the cMOOC philosophy pioneered by one of the course instructors.

The collaborative framework for this course involved the use of twitter, personal blogs, and the Edx platform (plus a few other resources) to encourage student collaboration. While taking the course I discovered this framework has other adherents, notably University Oxford’s 23 Things. 23 Things is a self-directed course for continued learning which instructs participants to make effective use of blogs and social media to engage with others.

What I tried to do. The benefits of the blog & social media framework should be apparent to all SCP participants. Artifacts such as actor tables were not effectively presented as text in the discussions. My blog for the course scp.thenaiveapproach.com provided a central place for me to own my content, neatly with tables and images.

I also posted to twitter. Unfortunately the #SCP tag was getting lost in my twitter stream with the topics spaces for PortugueseSoccer, Sporting_CP, Supercarphotographer and another twitter user who’s posts are displayed in Korean Hangul. I tweeted to the @scpmooc tag on Nov 27 a warning the #scp name space collision, but there were no responses.

Course instructor participation is key. One effective aspect of the DALMOOC course was the frequent presence and participation of the instructors in the forums and social media spaces. The instructors worked to recognize student contributions with as little an effort as a retweet. Feedback makes all the difference in student participation. With the exception of programming course I’ve taken, DALMOOC had an incredible level of participation. (I’ve been participating in MOOCs since 2012).

I recognize English is a second language for our instructors (and to be truthful, I rarely thought of the language barrier because the instructors are so conversive in English). Is there a language barrier with written English?

Some other possibilities Peer grading? For a course promising to be collaborative I witnessed none of this behavior. Which is not to say it wasn’t there, but when someone spends a good deal of time on an assignment, they want feedback. I expect I would see more evidence. With weekly assignments and projects, maybe the course instructors should take advantage of the peer grading systems in Edx, or some other automated system designed to pair students up.

Final word. The instructors brought enthusiasm and thoughtful dialog to the subject. The instructor’s commitment to the subject is also evident. Every single communication from the staff was encouraging. I only hope it’s possible in the future to build in mechanisms which permit more consistent realization of these efforts.