What are we doing differently in #change11?
Each time we’ve offered an open online course, we’ve experimented with the technologies and the format. CCK08 was our first attempt and The Daily was quickly determined - by course attendees - to be vital.
In CCK09, we started messing around a bit with the weekly format and we held several online conferences in place of weekly activities.
With EdFtures and LAK11, we used Drupal and Google Groups to organize discussion.
In CCK11, we dropped the use of Moodle completely and emphasized distributed, blog-based interaction.
In all of our open courses, Elluminate was a constant tool for weekly meetings. Blackboard has since purchased Elluminate and rebranded it as Blackboard Collaborate. Shortly after, they cancelled the community partner relationship that I had with Elluminate.
As a result, we’ve been looking for a different tool to use for the Change open course. Stephen, Dave, and I are unanimous in our dislike for Adobe Connect. We’ve looked at Vyew, WiZiQ, and Big Blue Button. Due to some customer service issues with WiZiQ and a lack fo comfort with Vyew as a new tool, we decided to go with the open source option of BBB. After three years of open courses, we’re finally all open source!
Synchronous sessions are vital for open courses. Each weekly presenter will host a live session (which we’ll record) and as facilitators, we’ll host another weekly discussion in BBB. We expect that we’ll have some growing pains in the first few weeks of BBB, so we’re asking for a bit of patience on your part as we work through headaches and bugs.
We will try a few sample online sessions early next week so that once we start with the course, we’ll at least know the problems we are likely to encounter and have to work around.
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gsiemens posted this
