Just started with a MOOC: overwhelming!

an #etmooc participant blog post published on
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Let me start with a picture I just made using Captioner:

Schermafbeelding 2013-01-21 om 12.24.45 Last week the #ETMOOC started: a Massive Online Open Course on Educational Technology and Media. I was too busy to get started with it myself, so I missed the introductory week. So many things are going on already! How to catch up?

Are you familiar with the idea of a MOOC? Some great oneliners explaining a MOOC:

cMOOCs are not proscriptive, and participants set their own learning goals and type of engagement.

cMOOCs are discursive communities creating knowledge together.

And… complexity is an essential part of the experience.

I joined two MOOCS in the past year. One was a MOOC on gamification, organised by the University of Pennsylvania. And the other was a MOOC on Change, facilited by Stephen Downes and George Siemens. Both a MOOC, but totally different in structure and learning process. The distinction Lisa Lane describes (network-based, task-based and content-based) is very helpful to see the possibilities. The #ETMOOC is definitly a network-based MOOC, which goes together with expressions like: overwhelming, I’m lost, where to start, don’t I miss important things, how to find the important stuff, and how to catch up?

I truly believe that it is very important to organise your own learning process. But how? An overview of topics, activities and online spaces might help. To give you an idea:

  • There is an ETMOOC website/weblog;
  • Every week (of 6) has a topic, and there are webinars scheduled;
  • There is an ETMOOC blog and an e-newsletter;Schermafbeelding 2013-01-21 om 13.23.42
  • There is the hashtag #ETMOOC which links all online spaces and activities to each other;
  • People are blogging about the topic of the week, which you can read in your RSS reader;
  • We share thoughts on Twitter;
  • There is a Google handout which is a perfect place to meet other participants;
  • Many interesting links to internet articles and YouTube video’s are shared on Delicious.

I probably miss some online spaces and links. But I hope to give you an idea of the complexity of a network-based MOOC. How to deal with that? I very much like the four types of activity George Siemens described for a ‘connectivist’ course:

  1. Aggregate: you will have access to a lot of content, but you are NOT expected to read and watch everything. Aggregate means you pick and choose content that looks interesting to you.
  2. Remix: once you’ve studied on some content, your next step is to keep track of that somewhere. How? You can keep a document, a blog, save links to a social bookmarking tool, share an insight by Twitter.
  3. Repurpose: create something of your own. This is probably the hardest part of the learning process :-)
  4. Feed forward: share your ideas and thoughts with other people.

I will be using this blog in the upcoming weeks to remix, repurpose and feed forward what I learn. Looking forward to that!