I have registered, and have been attempting to make sense of a new educational class offering called a "MOOC," which stands for Massive Open On-Line Course (or Massive On-Line Open Course…not sure which order the 'O'S go).
The details are relatively easy to recount:
- There are over 500 people in the course, from all over the planet
- The course is free
- The subject of the course is educational analytics (more in the next post)
- The syllabus is somewhat vague, as befits a class that seems to define itself thru the interests of its students
- The course is conducted on-line, using discussion lists, Moodle and recorded sessions (among others).
Beyond this, it is not quite as easy to document, and I am trying to make sense of the experience. As someone who has spent an inordinate amount of his life in formal educational settings, I am not quite sure what to make of this, whether in terms of syllabus (and the definitions given there) or how I should structure the content in my own head. I know the theory of constructivism, and I have monitored myself constructing various knowledges in the past, but I find it somewhat tiresome.
(I am looking at that last word and feel I should explain a bit. I find constructing knowledge literally tiring – the mental exercise of trying to simultaneously learn the limits of a subject while at the same time ordering it in a way I can remember and remembering the details of the content hurts my head. As a learner I want to get the core knowledge of a subject organized by an expert in that subject, and then, after I have the basics, I can then expand it on my own and along my own pathways. This is a learning style I have come to recognize and enjoy. I also realize that I am not prone to enjoy the alternative, going all the way back to high school. The first time I got to experience the alternative was in a language class when I was forced to suffer through tapes of someone babbling in a Russian while the teacher told us that eventually we would come to understand the language just by listening to it – yeah right. That worked for "where's the bathroom," and other caveman utterances, but was less effective for topics subtle or philosophic)
So, at the moment I am struggling to order the experience. I am still following the old paths – I got the readings and I read them all, now I am in search of a group to discuss them with. This post is one attempt to connect with those who might be in the same boat as me (or at least in the same learning style), which may be one way of connecting with other people and getting to the core of the content.
I suspect that there will be much more over the next few weeks.
R
