By demonstrating that you could build a very “open” course on Coursera, the University of Edinburgh team in charge of E-learning and Digital Cultures succeeded in breaking down some walls between the large-scale free course (called xMOOC by some critics) and the cMOOC connectivist learn-fest.

How did that happen?

• Incubating a community: Long lead-in time for the learning community. This made the community ready to go at the start of the course and the early birds in the community were very open and welcoming
  • look at the stats on Circlecount for the Google+ EDCMOOC community:
• Participants: for a large part of the participants, this was a professional/personal development event about the affordances of MOOCs.
  • Many of the participants are teachers, says the EDCMOOC team blog, “learning from edcmooc students”
• Course subject: reflecting on learning and being human in relation to technology. It was learning about learning and the affordances of the Internet for learning. The fact that this course was built on a MOOC platform associated with “just free” open courses, was a nice demonstration in overcoming technological determinism (technological determinism was a subject in the first week).
• Organization of the contents: a short-film festival each week, with related readings, accompanied by clear instructions on what was considered to be “core” material and what was additional. Encouraged to do your own thing with the contents.
  • For a timeline of the contents and some of the interaction, see Ess Garland’s EDCMOOC Timeline in Tiki Toki
    
• Also, all course contents were freely available on the Net, contributing to the “opennes” of this course
  • Dave Cormier’s blog post about the use of open content in MOOCs and what that might mean for the publishing industry: Will MOOC as curation kill the paid journal?
• Organization of the interaction: very loose. Create your own blog and add your feed to the aggregator. Use the hashtag so everything is findable across different platforms. Participate as much as you want, where you want, no need to use the coursera forum.
• The instructors were there, in the forum, commenting on blogs, responding on Twitter. In their second Google Hangout (they did two), they discussed, among many other things, their strategy on teacher presence. Christine Sinclair mentioned, for instance, that she felt like participating in a student group, but that she did not want to barge in as a teacher.
  • On teacher presence and scaffolding in a MOOC, and more specifically EDCMOOC: “Levels of Scaffolding” by Keeley Sorokti.
  • On the EDCMOOOCteam blog, this subject was addressed often, but maybe best in the following post: Hamish Macleod expresses his concern about people feeling ignored.
• Testing and outcomes: create a digital artefact, one, at the very end. There was no testing at all for recall of terms and concepts, instead there was an encouragement to generate new content.
  • EDCMOOCteam blog on the artefact and the assessment in EDCMOOC:
  • See this Wallwisher with a collection of #edcmooc digital artifacts

Wonderful #EDCMOOC wrap-up, video-style by Wayne Barry:

The Edunauts: Educational Explorers for the Digital Age from Wayne Barry on Vimeo.