Overall the Community Empowerment MiniMOOC was a positive experience. It showed how a variety of programmes and applications can be used to support learning on-line. As a result I've now used Twitter, Google+, Skype and Disqus as well as previous use of Facebook. The format was to run weekly webinars with an input from a variety of practitioners followed by threaded discussion and in between each weekly session an individual task to complete.
The main challenges were getting used to the technicalities (some people had difficulty connecting due to unfamiliarity, poor waveband, employer's firewall, etc) and encouraging people to actively participate. For me this last point is the crunch issue. There were up to 40 individuals participating across all the MOOC sessions but in any one session only a handful moved from' lurking' to active participation. It is difficult to get many people to commit themselves to commenting in discussion threads and there is clearly a need to develop strategies for supporting, provoking and facilitating participation. This is an issue requiring ongoing consideration and I want to use this blog to follow progress.
The MOOC concluded with a face to face seminar which brought together a number of the active participants and the university staff. There was more input, group exercises and discussion around community empowerment CLD practice. This was enjoyable, instructive and consolidated the group amongst those who attended. But for me, this was ultimately an opportunity missed, as attention now turns to a new MOOC on a different subject, whilst this meeting could have been used as the springboard for an ongoing virtual network of community empowerment practitioners, strengthened by the face to face contact, and contributing to CPD outcomes. However that, it seems, is not what The North Alliance want.
So I think my main attention will now turn to my work with Footprints Connect... see my next post.
Lovely reflection about the MOOC though I'd say that the North Alliance DO want to create sustainable ongoing virtual networks. The difficulty is encouraging people to do just that. There has been minimal interaction on the various online sites I've set up (North Alliance's NING site & Google Groups) I've tried my best to generate conversations particularly about the Curriculum for Excellence film that the North Alliance produced that's on You Tube but there's been little discussion and I'm surprised. Perhaps there are just too many sites out there, too many places for discussions so we need to focus on fully utilising a few good & accessible resources. There is still lots to learn and as we do we race against the ever accelerating virtual evolution.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback Ramone, if anyone else from the MiniMOOC is reading this it would be good to get more comments on...
ReplyDelete- setting up an ongoing on-line community of practice on Empowering Communities
- the general issue of establishing virtual networks
Meanwhile I was pleased to see that the next MOOC is a more general look at managing change in a CLD setting (I'd got it into my head that it was about specific changes to the delivery of CLD services rather than more general change in a CLD context - which is more interesting)
This is the link to the next MOOC
https://plus.google.com/u/0/117565407808852806993/posts/1FzfSQY2daz?cfem=1