The challenge was interesting for me from several perspectives.
First of all, it was a good exercise in course design. Thanks again to the team and my reviewers!
Another effect was a good insight into working with CourseSites from a learner’s perspective. This will be very helpful for the design of „Teaching for Tomorrow“ (#tea4tom) (s.a. tea4tom).
So during the challenge, I took some notes on the course which follow below. Some consider the learning designer or the LDC course itself others the work with CourseSites.
Positive Take-aways
Changing Perspective
• Just putting yourself into the perspective of some else gives you new insights.
• Getting over organisational blindness by critique of peers.
• Getting to know other approaches in teaching and learning. Looking at the teaching preparation (design) of other people is a little bit like a look into their head.
Tool Learning Designer
• Pie chart to show the balance between acquisition, inquiry, practice, discussion, collaboration and production in your learning activities.
• Export to a very readable MS Word document.
• The tool enforces a structured approach to the preparation of lessons/modules.
Timeframe
• Doing the challenge in a week was a bit demanding – but considering procrastination probably the way to go.
Other People – Same Problems
• It is always good to see that you are not the only human making mistakes… 😉
Problematic Points
Workload
• An hour a day challenge? Since the hangout sessions were already half an hour to three-quarters of an hour, it was impossible to take part in one hour a day. Maybe the course design should have been sketched on learning designer… 😉
Multi-channel
• Curse or blessing? Information was spread through several channels (Coursesites, Twitter, padlet.com). Since pieces of information were on some channels and other pieces on others, it took time to find one’s way around. A concise but complete overview of all need-to-knows on the LMS would have been nice.
Live Video Session
• The live video sessions were occasionally a technical challenge to the teaching team.
• Since questions only came in through twitter and the forum, there was no real interaction with participants and hence no necessity for technical challenging live sessions. Recordings could have been better prepared and shorter.
• The live sessions were not cut before being published as recordings. So some of them had ten minutes silence at the beginning due to delays in the beginning of the live sessions.
CourseSites
• There were reports on Twitter of CourseSites going down – on just 270 participants. I cannot verify this so far.
Blogs in Coursesites
• They are not intuitive (see question in Q&As of the course).
• Can you configure whether you want updates to comments or not?!
• With 35 and counting (3rd day) participants blogging, it is impossible to keep an overview. Needs splitting up in groups of 10 to 20 learners.
• Facilitators concentrated on blogs with many entries in the live sessions although it was suggested to use your own blog and to post the URL in the CourseSite blog.
Peer Review in Learning Designer
• When you decide on one design for a review, it is possible that someone else is already doing a review. There is no mechanism making sure a design is reviewed.
• I received three reviews on my design (thanks!). But I had already revised my design and submitted the revision again after the first review. So to incorporate the feedback of the following reviewers is impossible, when you want to stay true to CC BY, because you cannot merge the designs. Only one reviewer will be named in the tool.
Tool Learning Designer
• I experienced problems with the auto-save function when I paused too long and got logged out with my work not having been saved. Other participants reported similar problems in the forums.
• Initially, every saving process created a new version of the design with the same name that did not get a time stamp or version number. Later this Problem was fixed.
• An email about revisions/reuse of your designs would be helpful. Otherwise you need to go back to the tool all the time to check manually.
• The possibility to contact other users would be helpful. I would like to thank my reviewers for the effort they put into helping me ahead.
Badges
• Known (to Blackboard) problem of upload of open badges from Blackboard/CourseSite to Mozilla backpack.