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Because You’re an Extremely Experienced Student: Thoughts On Completing MOOCs
[The following image is a collage of one of my course-inspired Makes. The collage has 8 images of ways I had denoted the concept of teapot. I used charcoal drawing, gel pens, oil pastels, ink, cutouts and other art movement styles to create the images. This reflection began some time in written form in July 2016.] I get it. The word “MOOC” conjures up notions of hype and hoopla generated some 3 to 4 years ago, when Coursera, Udacity and some brand-name institutions launched free short open-access courses and invited the world in. [If…
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Magically Imperfect Groupwork
Team Limitless Project Prototype. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeRIMO3Gwkg Group work in Tina Seelig’s MOOC was a rewarding high-impact learning experience for me. In this post, I describe why it was so. We faced quite a few odds. Communication was a significant problem along a few dimensions. Night is day to my team mates. I want to sleep and they want to discuss potential project solutions. We used Whatsapp for synchronous and asynchronous communications after our MOOC message boards failed dismally. [I noticed that Whatsapp is popular with my international friends, but not so…
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Desiring to Learn is Not Enough by Itself
I’ve enrolled in numerous MOOCs and finished just one — so far. I think I may have found another that I will complete: UQx: Think 101x The Science of Everyday Thinking. Up to 80,000 people are taking part in this MOOC run by the University of Queensland.It’s Week 2 — the instructors organize the units into Episodes — and I’ve completed all assignments (except one) in Episode 2, on the very day it was made available. I’m astounded by my effort. What is it about this MOOC that has me…
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#CrashCreativity Thoughts Post 1
This MOOC, Crash Course on Creativity, is taught by Prof Tina Seeling (http://about.me/tinaseelig) of Stanford University and runs on Venture Labs’ e-platform. There is a lot of interest in this course with over 35,000 enrollees from all over the world. The platform is pretty minimalistic in a good way, with a menu bar that lets students navigate to Home, Lectures, Assignments and Community. I’ve watched a short course video intro so far and a week 1 TED talk by Prof Seelig on the Innovation Engine. Both were not captioned, nor…
