During my sabbatical year (July 1/12 to June 30/13), I plan to focus on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as one of my key areas of research. To do so, I’m considering planning, organizing and facilitating a semester-long MOOC focused on educational technology starting January 2013. I am envisioning the course to be somewhat similar to my EC&I 831 course, but with the focus more explicitly on the integration of technology in teaching, learning & professional development (hands-on sessions exploring major categories of tools with a focus on pedagogy & literacy).
I’m thinking that this course would be relevant to teachers, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, librarians, parents and likely many others hoping to sharpen their understanding of emerging skills and literacies. Also, it would be great to have newbies involved (people that are fairly new to educational technology and/or those we wouldn’t normally find on Twitter). However, before I get too far along in this, I want to make sure there is interest from both those that would enroll, and those that would help develop & facilitate the experience.
So, is there a need for this sort of thing? Is there anyone willing to help plan the experience? Anyone interested in participating in a course like this? Any thoughts on what we could do to make this successful? I’d love to hear from you.
Edit #1: There seems to be some interest already, so to make sure that I don’t lose any potential collaborators due to the chaos that is Twitter, please fill out this very short form if you are interested in participating. I will contact you very soon to get things started.
Edit #2: I wanted to capture the responses of potential collaborators/participants, so I put together this Storify. I’m really excited about this, and will get back to everyone by early September at the latest.
Could this be for credit? If so I might be interested?
Hmmm. That’s a good question, Greg. If you are thinking about U of Regina credit, we could probably run it for some people as an independent study.
Credit from U of R would be awesome. I am on sabbatical and was all hyped about taking your 831 course only to find out about your sabbatical!
Still not quite sure how it will be run, but I still think the credit option will be possible. What program are you in, Louise?
I am registered at the U of A in the MES program, Leadership & School Improvement. Currently I am taking a couple of courses from Acadia University and Leadership 2.0 from PSD & George.
I may have a couple of staff members interested and will check. Personally I am interested but think a group would benefit our school the most. What are your thoughts?
@Dawn That’s be really great. I’d love to make that kind of thing a big part of this experiencing – getting groups of people to connect and learn locally while connecting to the larger group. Perhaps we could develop a guideline for this sort of thing from others who have done something similar. Let’s talk.
Sign me up!
Word spreading around school and networks to follow….
I’d love to work with newbies, helping with learning to use technologies the MOOC might encourage and of course other technologies. Of course i’d love to be a part of the learning group too.
I’d be keen if it went ahead.
I am considering different ways to deliver PD to teachers and administrators in the area of educational technology and I think that a MOOC would be a fantastic core/structure for that type of learning.
I am certainly available to help with the design and delivery. I was planning to run a MOOC myself for this purpose, but collaborating would be so much more effective.