What’s gonna work…Teamwork

In Team Awesome Sauces journey building our presentation on the ​edX101: Overview of Creating an edX Course (edX, 2018b) I realized a couple of important things.  First, collaborating as a team from several different time zones is very challenging…we had many synchronous meetings but due to time zone issues (and work, and family…) having everyone present was difficult.  In spite of that, I feel that the combination of using appear.in to virtually connect and record our sessions and using google docs to asynchronously connect and comment on each others work was very successful. Our committed team members worked tirelessly at all hours of the day it seemed in order to assist each other in our endeavor.

Presentation and Feedback

I felt our presentation went well, and that the audio and video quality was acceptable in collaborate.  What I was really impressed with was how many of our classmates came out to support us on a Friday night of the long weekend!  The discussion after the presentation to me was the most valuable part. In fact, there were a couple of comments in our team feedback that had stated that people wished we could have extended that.  Other valuable feedback was that almost unanimously our classmates appreciated the connection to a recipe for awesome sauce that provided cohesion for our presentation. Also, a couple participants stated that they had wished we could have explain more fully what edX actually was and gone deeper into our actual instance.  In retrospect, we did gloss over some finer details and incorrectly assumed that all had prior knowledge of edX. All in all, I was very pleased with both the presentation and the feedback.

Quality Assurance in MOOCs

My particular focus was on the quality assurance (QA) in this edX MOOC, and by extension MOOCs in general.  I keep thinking that there should be a magic bullet in terms of QA for MOOCs…a template for how to build a successful MOOC, but the more I look into it the more I find that just like traditional courses, each MOOC is unique and so is the composition of all the participants within that MOOC.  EdX has their own checklist (edX, 2018a), but I found it to focus more on style than substance, and when I compared this checklist and the edX101: Overview of Creating an edX Course (edX, 2018b) to a well utilized traditional online course QA such as Quality Matters (Higher Ed Program > Rubric | Quality Matters Program, n.d.), they both seemed to fall well short.  As I completed my research for this project, I started to fall into the line of thinking that the success of a MOOC should process focused, not outcomes oriented (S Downes, 2016).

MOOCs are here to stay for a while I believe, and as they are a completely different animal than a traditional online course, time will tell what makes a successful MOOC.  One thing is certain, they have provided the educational community an opportunity for discussion on what the future of education looks like.

References

edX (Producer). (2018a). MOOC Development Checklist. ​edX101: Overview of Creating an edX Course. ​[MOOC]​.​ Retrieved from https://courses.edx.org/c4x/edX/edX101/asset/edX_MOOC_Development_Checklist-a11y.pdf

edX (Producer). (2018b). ​edX101: Overview of Creating an edX Course. ​[MOOC]. Retrieved

from https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:edX+edX101+1T2018/course/

Higher Ed Program > Rubric | Quality Matters Program. (n.d.). Higher Ed Program > Rubric | Quality Matters Program. Retrieved January 30, 2014, from https://www.qualitymatters.org/rubric

S Downes.  (2016, December 11).  The quality of massive open online courses.  [web log]. Retrieved from https://www.downes.ca/post/60468