Saturday 19 January 2013

Learning Design gone mad - OLDS MOOC

Desperately trying to follow the learning plan for Week 2 - but it is too prescriptive. Supposedly, the principles of Learning Design have been followed to design this OLDS MOOC. Oh dear.
Having a day by day activity list with the Thursday (day one) task being to "plan your week" is an example of poor context definition. How can you plan for what you do not know and for collaborative tasks you cannot find? Is it just a matter of putting down some times in a calendar? I am meant to make sense of this outline:
Present your contextual analysis (of the project? have not even determined a group to work with). Comment on others' analysis (where are they? most learning journals seem empty).
The highly structured, day by day defined activities do not fit the context of a MOOC with a diverse group of learners. I know if I prepared something like this for my classes, in such a rigid and structured way, it would all go awry in no time.
I am doing the reading but cannot contribute in the way that the highly scaffolded daily activities are asking.
Not looking very encouraging.... too prescriptive, too unrealistically scaffolded. Fine for classic left-brained sequentialists, how about the other half?? What sort of context planning is this?


4 comments:

ARTiFactor said...

George,
Yeay, I am not into calendars and goals. I am retired. At least I have 50 hrs/week to devote to this MOOC, lol.I go with the flow in fill in what I did afterwards,
To find a scenario project to critique go to http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2453 or look at mine http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/7619
Art

EKSwitaj said...

I'm with you. I have never planned out any project or course in the way they are asking us to do, and I have been a pretty successful learner (unless the fancy letters I can put after and before my name lie ;)). What I've decided to do is forget about trying to earn badges or "complete" and instead simply do the activities that feel useful to me.

Yishay said...

George, Art,

Some like a clear plan, others like to wander and explore. Take the calendar, planner etc. as recommendations. The activities are designed to be self-contained (or at least we tried), so that you should be able to remix and plot your own personal path.

Unknown said...

Yishay - yes, understand and this post is not meant as personal criticism, only feedback.
LD interests me for its potential to produce learning in students online, blended and f2f - so am learning about what works for different types of learners.