Education/EduCourse/Tools
We are very interested in ways/tools/ideas to increase efficient communication and collaboration in an open online course like this. Partly because scheduling can be difficult with a group based all across the world, but also because the tools for synchronous seminars are simply not ... ahem ... 100% reliable (yet).
Using Email is probably not the answer as the amount of msgs quickly becomes unmanageable. We could do more prerecorded audio or screencasts that everyone can work through at their own pace, and combine that with a chat channel that is always open for people to drop in for a quick discussion. Would something like this be useful?
Should we consider doing seminars that way - send out screencasts, and then discuss on text chat for an hour every week? Feedback about the seminars so far has been very positive, but there is clearly room for improvement.
What other (user friendly, efficient) ways to communicate should we use? Many of us are on twitter - that could be another good channel to exchange short ideas and questions. And it's a nice combination between synchronous and asynchronous.
If you are subscribed to the google group, you can also reply here: http://groups.google.com/group/open-edu-course/browse_thread/thread/33096e7f8cd9e04c
Tools we are using at the moment
- Each week, we have an online seminar using WebEx
- For questions and discussion we use the course mailing list.
- Participants are encouraged to share bookmarks. If you use www.diigo.com you can post directly into the course group and there is also a way to have diigo post it into del.icio.us automatically. If you are using del.icio.us, please tag resources as MozOpenEdCourse or mozopened.
- Diigo group: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/mozilla-open-education-course
- Del.icio.us bookmarks: http://delicious.com/tag/MozOpenEduCourse
- There is also a general IRC channel for Mozilla education discussions, but keep in mind that the channel is not exclusively focused on this course (#education on irc.mozilla.org)
All the other tools some of us are using to communicate, share, collaborate. Please add to this list!
- OPML file (coming soon)
- Course bookmark and blog planet (courtesy Joss Winn): http://learninglab.lincoln.ac.uk/mozillacc/
- Twitter www.twitter.com, use tags #mozopened or #mozopeneducourse
- @melaniemcbride, @sharingnicely (Philipp Schmidt), @igenoukan (Steven Egan), @josswinn, @lilabailey, @bitdepth (Chris Campbell), @wendallcada, @axolote (Elena), @smithwithclass (Brian Teacher), @CharityGE (Charity Gamboa), @marife (Mafe Mago), @deimidis (Guillermo Movia), @jbj (Jason B. Jones), @michael_rowe (Michael Rowe), @sdkaaa (Bernard Sadaka), @epanto (Eleonora Panto')
- Open alternative to twitter: http://identi.ca/
- Placing course bookmarks onto your blog:
- Example: http://melaniemcbride.net
- More course content aggregators
