= Check in call with P2PU staff =
Tuesday, 15 Wed 16 October @ 9:00am US pacific
Participants
- School of Open Data
- Stuff I think I need to get from you guys:
- 1. Total course sign-ups [X]
- For all schooll of open courses? or just the last run? for Round 2 (everything on the current school of open landing page)
- course_url, signups
- 2. Total course page hits, per page [ ] Jane dl from Google Analytics (starting 22 July to present)
- Not sure if we can get all of this? in server log form so a lot. google analytics overview, stats for suburls - SOO courses
- if on google analytics - dirk will give jane access
- 3. # of (Disqus - discussion forum) comments per course, and also per course section/page so we can see where students were engaging most with the course [X]
- dirk can pull from disqus api
- 4. Text of forum contributions [X]`
- The disqus comments?
- CSV: user, comment, url
- 5. # of participants who completed the stand-alone courses [X]
- - other stuff should be same regarding google analytics
- sign-ups?
- comments?
- and/or data on how many completed it up to a certain task/assignment [X]
- We can only get task completion for old style challenges ok, that's what we need
- 6. Data on badges - how many of each type were awarded per SOO course (all 7 SOO facilitated courses listed had badges associated) [X]
- url, how many was awarded
- Stuff I think I need to get from course organizers:
- 1. # of participants who completed assignments at each level of facilitated courses, and also # of total completed assignments for course overall
- 2. # of participants who completed the facilitated courses
- 3. # of blog posts per course, if any
- 4. Access to data on other platforms, eg. Google docs, Wikipedia
- 5. Hours facilitators spent on course each week, in total
- Course Feedback & Suggestions check-in: https://trello.com/b/AxNhy4Ey/feedback-and-suggestions
- Archiving courses - progress? - no progress yet
- Badges language - Progress?
- funding for badges almost up, vanessa will put on as a proj at end of the month
- most of the form language is pretty straightforward
- Spiffy icon, nifty badge and glorious creation - but other stuff has been cleaned up
- jane will send note to organizers about changes
- School of Open landing page - next steps?
- it doesn't fit all the dif schools and we need to look at a better solution that will work for more than one school
- we can make some short term changes
- we can update css stuff so it looks more in line with landing page for p2pu - will be farely superficial - so limited to text inputs we give you
- currently you can add html
- long term - requires a bit more work, some of it is general cms functionality
- one option: use something like WP, create a theme that styles it more according to the way rest of P2PU does, run it on subdomain, eg. schoolofopen.p2pu.org
- WP gives you complete freedom over customizing stuff. also we currently link courses on the home page via manual process
- also gives you flexibiilty to add pages, update pages when you want to, better text editor
- next steps:
- setting up for hosting is easy
- developing theme to make it look like a p2pu school will take a while longer. what do we want to add?
- link back to schoolofopen.org from courses...
- strategy disc - stuff is up in the air so difficulty to prioritize what needs to happen when. until dirk knows where we are headed, it's safer not to try and do things too big
- Translation process - next steps?
- course content - that's good even if we do something else. so they should go ahead and do it manually. we'll keep content irrelevant of what tech cahnges
- eg. if we only take courses and throw other stuff away, it will be easier for people to translate (will only be a small set of things to translate)
- translation of platform - put on hold until we clear up where we're headed
- follow up with folks who have done some translation separately to explain situation?
- Course platform - strategy in progress, up in the air
- Course faciltators feedback specific to p2pu.org (if you want to see all feedback in depth: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/school-of-open-course-feedback )
- Badges
- 3 fields in form - didn't really follow, did our own thing. feedback varies by project, so just linked to feedback already put elsewhere
- this is working for other individuals, so probably won't change
- inability to edit feedback/contributions after the fact seems inflexibile
- You can always add more feedback to a project instead of editing
- you can now edit the badge after you create it
- separate platform for badges seems complicated and was confusing for some participants (it not showing up in actual course)
- Disqus does not work. can we find something better? (manually sign up for notifications, separate from course ux, just didn't work for some people for some reason)
- needs for a messaging/discussion board for courses: something like Wikipedia's Talk page but simpler. something that facilitates discussion versus just posting of comments. something that facilitates posting of longer messages in this way. Google group is one option but it's another barrier b/c people have to create an account, sign in, and then the google group isn't always obvious that its a forum/discussion board
- Etherpad - stopped working at some point. will this be an ongoing issue?
- We are experimenting with hackpad and we are pretty happy so far. Biggest draw back is no anonymous editing.
- Microsoft Explorer - still having issues with it not working for teachers. Explorer is the only thing teachers can use at many schools in AU or US, b/c firefox/chrome is blocked in the institution. How to resolve?
- At the moment we can only show an notice about it.
= SOO facilitators call debriefing Round 2 (call 2) =
Wednesday, 8 October 2013 @ 8:00am US pacific
Google hangout link: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/edd12e085224ef7bb3934b8c817636abefdac413
Participants
- Jane
- Simeon
- Billy
- Add your name here..
Agenda
- Hello! Introduce self and course you ran. If you had to sum up one main takeaway from your course this round, what would it be?
- Billy - OPen science - broad spectrum of participation
- Simeon - Why OPen? - how wide it was but how willing people are to explore broad topics. too little time to cover anything in depth. in general it was too broad a topic, needed to break it down into smaller segments for it to really come together.
- Laura - Copyright 4 Educators (US) - second time running it (offered 3 x prior). general arc - limited to 40, was pretty ruthless about cutting and making people leave if they werent doing assignments. didn't want people to pair off with people who weren't there. pick one person to be a buddy (partners) worked pretty well. useful in lessening frustration of participants but a lot more work on facilitators end. did have much higher participation through first 2/3 of the course. started out with 40 and dropped to 25 or so, maintained this through the first third, and most of that through second third, and significant drop off in last third. last third subject matter shifts a bit, away from pure copyright to CC/paracopyright or other matters. or just accelerating attrition. Weekly chats - same 2 people got together - useful to them - but not useful to facilitator
- What worked?
- Simeon
- Twitter chat and Google hangout - one a week. these were awesome bc it helped to bring on board people who didnt had time to read through the materials. so different people joined inthese actvitites. melting point for weeks worth of work. Frequency of twitter chats helped people keep up to date on course, connect with other people and see how dif views melted together
- Created a Twitter account with hashtag for the course
- distributed facilitation - could easily catch up by watching recorded twitter chats, google hangouts, plus constant communicationw with quick updates
- one faciltiators had to be the organizer
- Billy
- Google hangouts on air - 3 panels across 3 weeks. Billy, someone helping facilitate speakers,a nd broadcast. 20-25 people watching the live broadcast with 10 people in hangout. Recording
- Using etherpad during live hangouts was useful - some folks wished we had more robust version of etherpad that had chat in window
- Not requiring much, but having dif options for people to participate
- specifically invited speakers that were already active using social media s- they helped with outreach/marketing. speakers were also pretty high profile
- pretty templated email that i sent to ask people to join as a guest speaker. had more people respond than i had spots for. having invitation ready, id panel as more of a conversation, exploratory conversation, and less of a top-down approach. conversation around topic but without specific goals. everyone presented in a dif way, eg. ppt. personal stories. bring a question from people in the broadcast
- Laura
- Partners/buddies worked
- Google hangouts worked w/high maintenance students - open hours and Google hangout
- Google group open to everyone to post to
- Set everything up for them
- Question for those who ran a course before. What changed between Round 1 and 2?
- Laura
- Technical problems lessened from last time - set everything up for them this time
- fall off from participation was less
- individual buddies versus small groups - personal responsbility to another defined individual
- What could still be improved? and/or challenges/issues
- Laura
- how scalable is that for a volunteer facilitator to do all that additional work to prevent drop off. takes a lot of effort to keep people on task
- implementing more of a sign-up procedure at the beginning would be helpful - eg. i understand that i will be doing... contract/agreement btw participants or just commitment to the class
- a bunch of people i work w/ turned out to be IT people, so they are already a leg up but it was still challenging for a lot of them. really a barrier for people
- would be great to have everything embedded into p2pu
- disqus didn't work for me -
- so using google docs
- Simeon
- Getting people to join and retaining them. 5(?) in total that were active.
- Someone in Nairobi couldnt participate bc technology. So find tech tools that lower the barrier to participation. We used too many dif tools, and some of them are intimidating. Find tools that dont have signups or are very intuitive to use
- Disqus is just not useful
- Billy
- Using disqus as a way for participants to post a link to the blog
- manual notification about each thing
- anything that you have to sign up for is one more barrier
- Distributed Technology - so what is needed at core to run a course?
- Google group/listserve
- badge system
- Google hangout
- messaging board in every single course, like Wikipedia's Talk page but simpler (that doesnt require a login, new account), a discussion tool (something where participants can talk)
- disqus didn't work for this
- google group - wanted it to be for more develoipment of course and discussion of the course. might have worked for a discussion board. and its not as easy to use and intuitive to use for newcomers - listservs are hard for discussion
- Social media, eg. Twitter updates - best used for broadcast
- Wiki/ etherpad/google docs
- Suggestions:
- maybe if all facilitators got together before running the course to brainstorm the few tools
- 2014 facilitation schedule: 3 rounds - what dates work best for everyone?
- 1. February or March 2014?
- Pete: Likely that WIKISOO will be offered in approximately this time slot. May not have flexibility to time it precisely, but will try!
- Jessica - Feb would have to be late. Teachers come back from holiday late jan/early feb. early march
- Billy - late Jan or Feb (want to get through 2nd time before commiting to 3rd time)
- Laura - maybe - want to try to get somebody else to do it with you - start thread w/Lila
- Simeon - March. why open overlaps with knowledge prog with soo kenya so would be interested. if there is a team available next time then happy to run it again. also want to create a standalone course.
- each week si a specific focus/theme
- 2. June or July 2014? (off the School year is good for these folks)
- Christina
- Jeanette
- Jessica
- Billy - possibly
- Simeon - depends on the course - facilitation of first round (more than happyt o refine each time, and do 3x just to get perfect balance of content)
- 3. September or October 2014?
- Nonfacilitated versions
- Pete - looking to develop one for WikiSOO - w/weekly lab sessions ppl can log into. So could develop other people to teach the course, eg Jeanette!
- Simeon - standalone version of Why Open?
- Billy - tasks have been designed so people can do them on their own, but theres so much in the course that people cant get through it. so would have to be split int 3 standalone courses. explore later ..
- Quick update on platform requests/features: https://trello.com/board/feedback-and-suggestions/519f1f8ec9622886280016ff
- Additional course ux feedback and suggestions?
- Recruiting new volunteers
- If you will not be running your course again, who should we reach out to run it?
- Who should we reach out to generally to run a new SOO course?
- Michelle Sidler - facilitate open science or open humanities
- Leila and Cliff Ombiru - get contacts from Simeon
- Laura - one student she'll with him
- Badges - how did they work for you? how did they work for your participants?
- Laura - about half of the people went through process of badges. people who care about them care about them. others not as interested. willing to use them.
- process of awarding the badge - 3 part form seems kind of open ended, but for our part we ended up just posting link back to commentary that i put in group. so didnt fit into categories outlined in form
- one participant couldnt fix his typo - editing after the fact
- Billy - only a few people actually went through process of badges. they seemed much more interested in material/discussion than having a badge to take away. badges themselves didnt certify anything. more of an experience badge that we offered
- think they can be useful as a token of a participatn having an experience - have a bunch of other digital objects tied into it.
- maybe next tiem - make it more simple to relate the badge to the tasks that they do. see potential in badges, so it was interesting to see there was little interest in them. explore increasing value of them.
- process -- no way to edit it once youve submitted feedback. so inflexible in this way.
- separate platform was complicated
- Simeon - nobody applied for why open badges. didn't quite sense motivationa nd dint look into it myself
- Data I need to get from you (can do via email but heads up) for OER Research Hub fellowship by Oct 20
- 1. # of participants who completed assignments at each level of facilitated courses, and also # of total completed assignments for course overall
- 2. # of participants who completed the facilitated courses
- 3. # of blog posts per course, if any
- 4. Access to data on other platforms, eg. Google docs, Wikipedia
- 5. hours spent facilitating each week
- Add your agenda item here...
= SOO facilitators call debriefing Round 2 (call 1)=
Wednesday, 2 October 2013 @ 3:00pm US pacific
Participants
- Jane
- Pete Forsyth @peteforsyth
- Jessica Smith
- Jeannette
- Christina Hendricks (@clhendricksbc)
mickfuzz - i was hoping to make it but I can't
Agenda
- Hello! Introduce self and course you ran. If you had to sum up one main takeaway from your course this round, what would it be?
- Jane - takeaway - small groups didnt work for CC4K12 this round
- Jessica Smith - work with Delia Browne. Second cycle of Copyright 4 Ed (AUS) as part of SOO. Went great - doing it through Nat'l Copyright Unit in AU. Sent blitz out to people - other teachers picked it up and threw it on listserve. Limited to 60 students. Waitlist of 20. People who dropped out were non AU - and then only 3 ppl dropped out throughout the course.
- Christina Hendricks - heard of P2PU via Twitter, there's a School of Open! learned all issues around openness in last 2 mos. Took online course called ETMooc, connectivist course. Saw this course Why Open? that was listed, and pitched into work on it and found others interested too. Takeaway: Things tended to fall apart when we went into small groups. Partly that happened bc then they were doing work outside of the bigger group. Some of them werent doing anything, some were but we didnt know. Small groups were good for those who did get into it. Like them, but dont know how to do them better so everything doesn't just die. People don't really come back. Lots of attriition. 5/60 still active. 20 who ever did anything.
- Jeanette - worked with Christina on Why Open? and came to it through WikiSOO with Pete. Did know about P2PU before that via another course. Agree with Christina re small groups - work in person, but seem to be a challenge working over the Internet online. really be interested in thinking about how to get people to finish the course.
- Pete - Writing Wikipedia Articles - 3rd time running it. The second round was our most effective. The main reason for that is that Sara and I who were running the class took for granted the 3rd time and didnt put as much energy into it the 3rd time. Progressed each time in terms of how we present the class -- not spread out across multiple platforms, cleaner presentation, but the downside is that you still have to communicate very well up front no matter how good your platform is. Reflected in how much our students ended up doing. Really did have some students do excellent work. More people sign up in 3 than 2. We had more consistent attendance from some people, but the students were a little more reluctant.
- What worked?
- Jessica - small groups of 4 worked for us
- Being associated with the NCU of AU - its our job, to keep in touch and engage with librarians and teachers throughout AU. Having that network is invaluable.
- Capping at 60 - so people more interested got into the course.
- Waitlist from first course to join - they were waiting for months.
- Have it part of daily workload.
- Got great feedback from participants too.
- Right now AU is doing a huge review of copyright so schools have been slammed with copyright propaganda right now, so probably helped bc it was at the forefront
- 10 people who were required to take the course by their boss.
- Principal made their librarian. Most were technical colleges - dif roles but basically in charge of copyright stuff. Dean would require it.
- Christina - copyright has just been overhauled in Canada too. would be big in canada.
- Teachers can get professional dev credit for taking the course. A lot of them pay for seminars, but they can take this at home for free.
- Pete's Question: qualifying for this? Jess: really painful actually. IN US you have to do pd too, but here there are dif categories. one category is one that everyone struggles with and our coruse doesnt qualify for that yet. eg. if you took a course at uni, you could qualify for a credit at teaching assoc - we dont qualiy for that yet. but does qualify bottom level of PD. lower level - easiest hours to get. hours are recorded by whatever teaching association they're associated with. so we'll start with new south wales (75% of teachers) - intense process.
- Christina's Question regarding small groups - so how did you get them to work continuously?
- Jess: 2 week intro period. Complete initial questionnaire - 10-11 questions. What sector do you teach in - what level, etc. Some geographical/sector info. That's how we formed groups. Timezone, commonalities. 2nd week, all we had them do was meet their group and decide on collaboration tool. Worked better with our schedule. But think that the 2 week intro period was really imp - 2 small tasks in first 2 weeks. Every once in a while people wont do enough work. But I tell them to tell me if they have problem with their group, and they do email me. We think our target audience is similar - but this time, they all cc-ed Jessica on their emails. So got every single email! First cycle no one did it, this time half the groups did it. Don't know why it works... but it does. Every once in a while we had an early dropout, then I ask the group if they want someone new added to their group. All independent school teachers as well.
- Christina
- having group cohesion got me more engaged in course i was doing - otherwise i would have dropped out. how to foster that ?
- really liked the Twitter chats b/c they brought in other people who weren't part of the course, so could open it up to people beyond the course. +1 by jeanette
- great resources on our course - found really interesting things to read and talk about
- Question for those who ran a course before. What changed between Round 1 and 2?
- Jessica - this time it was so much worse - technical issues. Completely dif questions from first cycle. Delia was gone for most of it. First cycle was stellar. People would call all the time (NCU). Too much participant interaction.
- this time it was due to clueless participants, eg. gmail accounts. also google docs - last cycle very few issues. but this time, had 3 or 4 ppl that deleted other groups assignments. very little had to do with p2pu.
- we are still having issues with some versions of explorer not working with the platform. most schools use explorer. so ppl were relying on emails over platform.
- if they can just dl firefox/chrome but this is blocked at a lot of schools so only option is explorer.
- couldn't get to readings either, so just put the readings in the folder. would just end up sending it as an attachment
- archiving courses is still an issue
- Delia - disqus wasnt working properly - follow up on that with dirk
- disqus notifications werent working
- This time we sent out a weekly email every Monday - basically exactly what is on the course ux, but just send it out in an email making it really clear explaining exactlyw here to go, etc. People responded well to this.
- What could still be improved? and/or challenges/issues
- Jessica - had a lot of technical issues. Handholding - lots of it! No gmail accounts, etc. As a facilitator - this is painful if this isnt your main gig.
- we really lay it out for them. we'd have a lot of ppl drop out if we dont. largely due to our target audience - older teachers and librarians. they are already nervous about an online course. these arent people who are jumping online trying to learn something new at night. these are people learning for PD bc they have a gap in their knowledge for their job.
- Pete
- during course sessions, normally do lecture and sara monitors chat window - but otherwise they'll answer each others questions. found self torn this time between enjoying and appreciating when stuff happened that was not directly related to class, but also not wanting to get distracted by it itself. Sort of have a gut sense of how I would want that flow in a traditional environment, but in a dif environment, we don't have those norms yet. What is acceptable classroom behavior?
- dont' know how to honor group cohesion past beyond end date of the class. missed the subtle opportunities regarding this.
- also struggled with retention with all 3 rounds of our course. seems to me that people basiclaly really want us to break things down and tell them what to do much more incrementally than i'm inclined to. it would take a lot more prep work. reluctance on my part is work but also a less authentic wikipedia experience. but i think our students would respond a lot better if i created a list of 20 specific wikipedia articles with specific suggestions, eg. fix the grammar in this sentence of this article. hold their hand through first few edits. bigger logical leap for some people than i want to believe.
- maybe a dif state of mind for someone who is a very creative person in general when they step into a class. they may just go into a mode where they expect things to be laid out in a clear fashion.
- is it the kind of people we're attracting or the expectations people are bringing to a class?
- feedback for Pete re WikiSOO from Jeanette? J: really thought you set those expectations really well. felt that you were very clear that we had to take ownership
- as far as platform- moved towards wikipedia as a platform. made sense bc course is about wikipedia! had to think through how we presented it, but made it clear in box on p2pu and on course page that wikipedia is the place to interact. this is the course home page. so no real confusion.
- would still like to have a better synchronous tool - bbcollaborate has java, etc.
- Jeanette
- when we created groups, we did it according to timezones. if we created according to interest areas, that might help cohesion as opposed to timezones.
- What are the norms for an online class - I think that Christina and our Why open planning session - I think we took it for granted that people would be much more self directed. But these were adults so there was a bit of a disconnect between what we expected and what they might have expected. Most of us here are used to interacting in technology, but some people really w anted someone to hold their hand through the process. How do we get them to rethink that in an online environment.
- in the blog - that was one comment that came up - they want more direction.
- maybe have a participant expectation before we actually get into what the course is actually about. entering into the classroom space - people might fall back onto default position. but if we had a session talking through the dif pedagogy that we're going to do that might help shift expectation. +11
- etherpad stopped working at some point - that was major tech issues
- a few times had trouble with google hangout, had to go to twitter chat, bc we had people from all over. connectivity wasnt good.
- Christina
- we didn't have any expert people giving presentations. we had readings, but everything that was an activity - was to be done with each other, come up with their own ideas regarding blog posts. so less direction provided in our course. what are you most interested in in what you've read? this may not have fit most peoples learning styles.
- twitter chats - problem was that only like 2 people were participating in these - and more by ppl not really registered.
- not that much engagement past the first week or two. guess this is common with online courses. but doesnt always happen. so some ideas i have:
- is it too much to ask people to create a blog/write posts for such a short course? maybe should have just used built in discussion board
- if other people aren't reading those, then there's no common area for discussion really except twitter chat and google hangout
- but even when we were using discussion board, only one person did
- what exactly wasnt working? little bit puzzled. only got 4 responses on end of course survey
- ours was more vague - why open? so we felt it would useful to have discussion, but then it requires that people feel comfortable learning from each other. maybe things to learn - then discussion after that. so inbetween our course and jessica's approach.
- 2014 facilitation schedule: 3 rounds - what dates work best for everyone?
- 1. February or March 2014?
- Pete: Likely that WIKISOO will be offered in approximately this time slot. May not have flexibility to time it precisely, but will try!
- Jessica - Feb would have to be late. Teachers come back from holiday late jan/early feb. early march
- 2. June or July 2014? (off the School year is good for these folks)
- 3. September or October 2014?
- Nonfacilitated versions
- Pete - looking to develop one for WikiSOO - w/weekly lab sessions ppl can log into. So could develop other people to teach the course, eg Jeanette!
- Quick update on platform requests/features: https://trello.com/board/feedback-and-suggestions/519f1f8ec9622886280016ff
- Additional course ux feedback and suggestions?
- Recruiting new volunteers
- If you will not be running your course again, who should we reach out to run it?
- Who should we reach out to generally to run a new SOO course?
- Jeanette - one participant from Why Open? - helping with multilingual options. will reach out to her.
- christina - also knew someone else
- Pete - wikiproject open will be a good place to recruit for people who want to teach something, either wikisoo or something else.
- jessica - delia might have some ideas. interested in doing OER course also.
- also jessica coates - cc for educators
- Using a completed facilitated course as a basis for creating a self-paced/asynchronous course
- i think Christina also wants to do this for Why Open
- What can be done to preserve a sense of community once the course is done? (In our case: http://enwp.org/WP:WikiProject_Open ) - Pete will send update to the SOO list
- want to be involved, but dont want to feel like i have to be there (pete)
- What is the best way for us, as course designers/facilitators/curators, to (asynchronously) share our learning and support one another?
- think these calls are fantastic
- whats the easiest way for us to support each other? through design and execution
- maybe email list is part of it?
- general thing to follow up on -- pete will send email
- Badges -- have you awarded them? How are they working for you?
- going to get this data from vanessa
- also from OERRH surveys
- Pete: one we started was too ambitious for most of our students. a few students have earned it.
- recently created a more lightweight badge to award. only one has really applied for it
- the more incremental badge, probably the better.
- seems to me that people like the idea, but if theres not a lot of reason to have it, youre not going to pu teffort into getting it. maybe about applying for and displaying badge easy as possible?
- (Jane: or make it part of some portfolio?)
- at least with our badge, bc its tied in with concept of barnstars, its an imp way to communicate with the wikipedia community. (jane: so maybe plug into existing badge systems/communities?)
- it may be that badges are something that accrue value over time. of course in the first few iterations, they dont have any value -- but maybe if more people get them and we stick with it and are awarding even a few of them and writing blog posts about them, then it might start to naturally develop value on its own
- Jeanette: agree re incremental. part of the challenge with why open was that it was way too mucch. ambitious with what we wanted people to do. they were falling behind in terms of weekly assignments. we need to also remember that these are all working adults, so might be more successful with small time limits
- didnt apply for badge bc i learned what i wanted to learn so there was no reason for me to get the badge. did think of applying just didnt get around to it
- another participant said she also was not interested in the badges
- but i think there are people who are interested -- so maybe it can be an option in addition to something else
- Is there a way to create badges so people can post it on their linkedin or other profile? so they see there is a professional payoff?
- Jessica: did a badge per week. had a couple ppl apply for every single one. basically if they did the assignment, they got it. out of 60, only had 4 applying for them
- they are more interested in certificates
- Pete - have you considered tying badge to certificate? badges is how you demonstrate you earned the certificate
- agree regarding complicated badge app process - need it to be like 2 steps to get badge otherwise they are not going to do it bc they dont really see value/significance of it.
- needs to have more reasoning behind it - esp for people like our teachers. why is it imp to get a badge? they are not interested unless it leads to something else
- Data I need to get from you (can do via email but heads up) for OER Research Hub fellowship by Oct 20
- 1. # of participants who completed assignments at each level of facilitated courses, and also # of total completed assignments for course overall
- 2. # of participants who completed the facilitated courses
- 3. # of blog posts per course, if any
- 4. Access to data on other platforms, eg. Google docs, Wikipedia
- hours spent facilitating
- Add your agenda item here...
Current makeup of non online course contributions/activity at SOO: http://www.slideshare.net/janeatcc/expanding-the-school-of-open-affiliate-showcase
= SOO facilitators call (15 May 2013) =
Participants
- Jane
- Delia
- Jessica
- Laura
- Pete
Agenda
- Hello!
- Discuss course survey results: https://www.surveymonkey.com/sr.aspx?sm=OxTQZGhG_2b_2fie8RIo5ur5x80nUmVVVfUqVTf7xv7zG28_3d
- password: "class of 2013"
- Results -- not many. Did you send it to your participants?
- Pete - zero results (We sent in an email that had several action items. Participation had fallen off a good deal by then.)
- 90 people to 3-4 that were really engaged. awarded one badge. may have been too ambitious. might just need to scale back what we expect of our students
- we now know how to better facilitate the course in the future
- Laura - one response
- Delia - 3 responses
- Discuss - how did it go? (generally)
- Laura: 4 out of 50 by end of class.
- *I* had a problem using Google Docs -- thought I was commenting back on their individual assignments, but didn't have permission to edit their Google Docs, so my comments were saved on a private document. This was very frustrating to the students! (those of whom were left) and embarrassing to me! Definitely a user-error on my part, but it wasn't easy for me to see -- still isn't! -- which Google Doc is shared and with whom.
- Google Docs might work better if the instructor started it?
- We lost most of our people in the first two weeks, before the first assignment even was due.
- I think a longer introduction period might help, maybe *before* official "sign-on". Because it was frustrating to assign numerous groups, and then have to completely re-do that work because almost all the groups failed to cohere.
- after setting up groups - participation dropped off 50% (by first assignment). would love to hear about what might be key to high retention?
- difficult to work through which communication tools to use
- content overall worked well, but the interface was hard.
- we got the right target group - but there wasn't sufficient buy-in
- mix of disqus and email, google docs
- next time:
- 2 week instead of 1 week sign up period?
- pre-questionaire; longer intro; get people together
- THEN assignments to groups
- set up technologies (google docs?) FOR people
- ask people to notify (post to Disqus) when finalized; this helped encourage other people to finish.
- reminders by email to finish assignments
- need more help with course promotion - leverage educator and librarian networks/associations
- have some more on-ramping
- Delia (Copyright 4 Educators/AUS): people generally positive about the course. liked google docs. organized their own realtime discussions. peer review was successful. amazing retention (first time). lost only 6 students (first week or two).
- this time the assignments were simplified. feedback was given by wed every week. posted on disqus that their comments were up. would chase them on mon to make sure they had put their assignments up. reminder peer review.
- got them to fill out a questionnaire - where they were based, what they taught, institution (gov't, catholic school, instructional designers). put them into groups according to what state they were in and what kind of teaching they did. first two weeks - introduced them to each other and let them work out how they were going to communicate together. - emails and disqus
- google docs - we set it up. put links into assignments, already formatted, easy to fill in etc. everyone loved google docs. but we completely set up everything for everyone. we had to change the settings on the google docs so that we could edit and they could edit.
- assume they're not tech savvy, set up tool for them. if they want to use other ways of communicating, give them a list of tools. given fact 15 groups of 4 - thought it would be easier to use google docs than wp.
- we had a 2 week sign-up and a 2 week introduction period. i think that helped. and i think it also helped putting them into groups with other people who taught at a similar institute and in the same state.
- peers also posted on disqus when assignments were submitted - facilitators asked them to do this.
- other groups encourage each other to get assignments finished
- we communicated via disqus and email. we sent out a course-wide email about once a week. and we chased re assignments and peer review once a week via email (by group). only had to chase 2-3 groups
- many did it as part of training and institutional req's
- promotion - focused on teacher librarians, associations and groups, people we had already provided f2f seminars to, people we'd given advice to. big email list. we did a lot of very specific promotion. and everyone knew the course was full and we had a waiting list. so people felt very lucky to actually get into the course. which probably also helped with retention. we have about a 30 person wait list/to let them know as soon as we know when we'll offer the next course
- small groups -- good for building community
- once we got through the admin period for the first two weeks, it was really easy to run the course this time (first week questionnarie, second week figure out how to work together)
- the dif was 2 week intro
- setting up all technology for them. dictating stuff
- if the google docs woldn't have been done for them, a lot more would have dropped out
- 2 week intro, 5 weeks assignments (7 weeks)
- reassure them that things will get easier! teachers love getting things right. reassure that its all part of the learning process (google docs and email)
- we offered 'office hours' but no one ever came
- they just emailed me throughout the week with questions and a few would call every once in awhile (the ones i already knew previously and were comfortable calling)
- We have a copyright unit, phone number/office, website
- Give feedback according to categories below
- For new course - are you going to resetup the course pages?
- delia: yes
- Jane: yes
- laura: yes
- find course toolkit that we worked on in the past - one stop shop for what works in facilitating a course
- setting up is the most annoying part
- 5th time delia/jessica has run it
- Next steps
- Next cycle - July 15 - sign up period opens for two weeks, courses start in August
- Laura - maybe
- Delia & Jessica - first or second week of August
- Badges
- Pete - already has a wikisoo badge
- jessica - had a go and didn't like it
- delia - we're giving them a letter from the national copyright unit. badges freak us out a bit b/c it's very geek-based. teachers don't care. they want a certificate
- language around badges could be different and more "formal"
- only like positive feedback - don't know about the critique
- need to have capability wher eonly creator can issue badge
- standard language for badge
- volunteer designers --
- more design of UI and language - desc text around the badge, filling in form - doesn't fit our users. educators, older, etc. less "playful" "gamey" tone
- issue of having additional voice -- at the badges platform. different voice that they don't have control over
- international groups as well - must be to account for that
- there shouldn't be any mandatory language associated with the badges.
- professional dev - valuable user base, prob wouldnt find value in current system
- step of sending to backpack - etc. - just little things - clearer to badge owner
- let the platform get out of the way of what you want to do with badges
- how to adapt for user groups are more traditional
- sometimes badgse can be perceived as nti
- OER research hub
- Delia on board
- Pete - think a little more about it
= Feedback for P2PU staff =
Badges
- Awesome work! How can we also account for older, less tech-savvy, and formal course participants? eg. peers who are taking this to fulfill professional development training via Copyright 4 Educators. Suggested tweaks:
- Language on the site and when prompting people to fill in forms is fun, but may be a little too playful and trip up the experience for this type of audience. Can we make it more neutral to account for diverse, cultural and international, audiences?
- Critiques - suggest not requiring this field and focus on positive feedback and what might be improved instead. Maybe can still have this field, but not require it.
- Need to have capability where only creator can issue badge. This is important for any course facilitators associated with orgs/institutions/gov'ts (eg. National Copyright Unit of AU, CC)
- Make more clear to badge owner all the little steps they need to take to make sure they can issue badge, eg. check email for badge email, then do, etc.
- Overall: want the platform to allow for all different types of badge creation - whether playful or more formal - by neutralizing language.
Course UX suggestions
- Disqus - Ability to turn Disqus on and off, or some other way of making clear to participants that they shouldn't use it for a particular course
- Enable collaborative course development - how can we do this via course ux with multliple organizers? eg. revision history?
- Archiving course pages - how can we archive pages we don't use for any reason?
- Draft course pages - can we save course pages as drafts for use later? eg. Tumblr and blogs allow for this.
- Scheduling for different timezones - using external tools to schedule stuff, is there way to integrate?
- P2PU course running on a dif platform - how can we still be part of P2PU and/or School of Open but point people else where for the actual course? eg. handle sign-up and initial course communication via P2PU but would be more of a splash page that goes somewhere else. Right now with disqus and everything - it confuses people where the course is running, even if we try to make clear in text.
- Announcements - no history of sent messages. ability to look back on what we sent to who. currently an empty box you type into.. don't know where it's going, how it's formatted, what the "from" or "subject" field will look like.
- The fact that the #hashtag field in "Settings" feeds into the subject line of "Announcements" is not obvious. What else does it do? We would prefer to have the course name (without a #, and with the ability to use spaces) in the subject line -- or, ideally, just generic control over the subject line. Agreed: 20 characters makes for a very short subject line, and not being able to use spaces is tricky.
- Accounting for people who sign up after we send out initial announcement? Maybe announcement could have ability to auto-send a customized greeting to new students when they enroll.
- Email addresses are the only way that makes sense -- so how to get them as course facilitators while abiding by privacy policy, etc. - as new students sign up as well. Do we go through Dirk each and every time?
- Also - with emails we have no username/identity to attach to them the current way we get them. Would be good to have a list of the course participants.
- People page - the main piece of information facilitators seek is the username and total enrollment number. How to make these clear.
- Not quite clear what it means to "Follow" someone or to be "Followed".
- Brief explanations around certain form fields - Confused by non-English on the Settings page - Gearchiveerd, Gesloten? Also not sure what "rolling term" means in this context - perhaps some text to clarify? Same with most metadata fields- perhaps a brief explanation of what these terms mean and how the data will be used.
- Text editing
- Markup isn't entirely intuitive for newbies. Can we have some notes for people or a preface with tips? Didn't realize for a while that moving text around while editing text wouldn't automatically update the footnote order - so ended up with wrong citations attached to text during course development. Perhaps a note to users to this effect.
- An edit button at the top as well as bottom of each page would be greatly appreciated, for work on longer pages requring extensive edits.
- If the "Start Course" button were visible in the first screen it would not be necessary to add a sentence explaining to people where to click to sign up for the course.
- Titles in the course boxes get cut off -- would be nice if it didn't!
- P2PU doesn't work with older versions explorer. Make sure course ux works in all standard browsers - not just Chrome and Firefox (the open ones).
- Interface doesn't make it clear what will happen with future ux or tools. eg. the challenge ux just went away
- Course support toolkit or resource - Allison had developed one (or several) but can't find it after searches through old wiki and archive.p2pu.org. Where is this so we can adapt and update?
= Course Feedback =
Approaches that worked
- Quick feedback by Wed (if assignments were due Sunday) each week. They also knew when to expect feedback by.
- Follow-up with groups who have not submitted assignments. Would bug them the next day (Monday for Sunday assignments) if they had not submitted. This would happen over direct email to the small group.
- Be responsive to user issues and questions that come up during the week / Student retention was also enhanced by rapid response to questions posted online, whatever the forum
- Keep feedback positive. Remind participants everything is part of the learning process
- Have employers require and/or encourage taking the course (eg. depts of education, school authorities)
- Attach facilitator to org/institution name (eg. National Copyright Unit, DOE of Australia)
- Seek ways to offer formal accredition/recognition for professional development
- Focus more on social interactions and let the participants make meaning themselves rather than trying to "impose" a lot of external content / Social interaction (people responding to you or interacting with you) helped returning P2PU members keep up their participation...
- Have a fair number of people sticking with the School and move together from course to course over time. Build on-going community
- Clear course design helps newcomers get going and active (particularly clear course page designs that explicitly ask people to do something active like post, comment etc.)
- Externally hosted live webinars for IM and voice interaction with students - the ones who showed up the first 1-2 weeks stayed engaged and kept coming back to online resources. This makes sense as our course was designed to rely on these live webinars
- Cap the number of students
- Small Groups: We attempted to split everyone up based on location and teaching institute type. So we divided everyone into States/Territory and by sector (Schools, Uni, TAFE, Catholic, Independent, Government) and attempted to make groups from the same state/territory and teaching institute type.
- Course work should help peers gain mastery of skills
- Two week on-ramp time to take care of admin details, etc.
- Tutorials on how to use the tools - In Copyright 4 Educators (AU), facilitators asked gave peers a tutorial with screenshots of how to use Disqus and then asked peers to post to Disqus each time they had submitted an assignment.
- Simplify assignments
Tools that worked
In general: Setting up all tools/technology for them. Don't give them too many choices - facilitator should decide what tools and make it easy. Dictate how you want them to use tools - distinguish between which tools for what, eg. this is where you'll submit assignments, this where you'll discuss X, etc. With courses it's kind of like listing the type of calculator you would need for a math class, books you need, or general prerequisites.
- Google docs: We’ve received really great feedback about the google docs. A lot of teachers were nervous about the P2PU platform/an online course/’new’ technology and a lot of them were nervous about google docs. I’ve been really surprised at the number who had never used google drive/google docs before. But every learner I’ve spoken with regarding the google docs has said it’s very easy, so much easier than they thought it would be, very user friendly, etc. So very positive feedback.
- There are links to the docs in the course. Every week where there is an assignment due (weeks 3-7), we include a hyperlink to a google folder for that specific week, which has a doc for every group. For example, HERE is the link to our Week 3 tab/information on the P2PU site. In the second sentence there is a link to the google folder. These links are specific to each week’s assignment.
- Email: It seems as if most are communicating via email. There are a few groups of friends/co-workers that requested to be together, and they appear to be meeting up and doing the assignments together in person. But it does seem as if most other groups are communicating via email.
- Introductory survey/questionnaire via Google forms: Ask for info to split people up into small groups and for admin info needed. Send people to to this for their very first interaction.
- Wikipedia: We built custom Wikipedia pages in the first round of our course, which worked fairly well; looking to upgrade our experience by transitioning to Wikipedia Course Pages (see below).
- Wiki Educator: We used WikiEducator as a place for instructor-facing resources. It would be better to have these in the SOO platform, but this worked for us. http://wikieducator.org/Writing_Wikipedia_Articles
- IM: Our students chatted weekly before, during and after lectures using the IM feature of Blackboard Collaborate, and a sense of community - and user personality - developed in this manner. Some used voice on occasion but most did not.
- Webinar: We used Blackboard Collaborate. It's far from ideal: it's difficult to connect to, and requires Java. It also only archives sessions within its own format, which offers nice features but makes it hard to disseminate by YouTube or Wikimedia Commons etc. But the upsides greatly outweigh the downsides. It is nice to have a platform that ties so many functions together. -WIKISOO
- Wordpress
- Existing P2PU challenges (comments system embedded in these)
- Also, maybe with courses that are similar in structure or within a school people could try and come up with a set of recommended tools to use in order to create more consistency and allow people to feel more comfortable jumping into new courses.
Tools that will be explored
Suggested course ux fixes/features/tools
- We would very much like it if we could disable Disqus, and populate the "Discussion" tab with our own content (basically saying, "here is where we discuss things on Wikipedia, and here's how to contact us by email). This is really important from our perspective; like many SOO topics, we have an issue of "a platform within a platform within a platform" which leads to very complex screens full of information that is not all directly relevant to the student, and removing extraneous discussion options will go a long way toward helping us create a cleaner, more comprehensible user experience. (Pete F/Writing Wikipedia Articles class)
- Specific to Wikipedia - but would also be common to courses that might use a dif platform, or use various open platforms
- No revision history for course pages. Can't see history of course pages, view diffs, determine who did what. Not possible to collaborate effectively on building a course without being able to see one another's changes.
- (related to above) No archive system for SOO pages within a course. We would like to be able to archive the 6 or 8 pages that we are retiring, in case we want to refer back to them, instead of deleting them. We've worked around it by pasting the markdown and the rendered pages into a Google Doc, but this is a bit cumbersome. (Pete F/riting Wikipedia Articles class)
- Related: would be nice to simply deactivate/disable ("un-publish") pages instead of deleting them.
- Any facilitated course with synchronous sessions will face this issue: how to present class dates and times to students in many time zones, and (depending on the time of year) in countries with varying Daylight Savings/Summer Time policies?
- Letting people list courses on P2PU (and as part of P2PU) that are hosted elsewhere. The course would just be a splashpage that points people elsewhere. Or we could still handle sign-up through P2PU (so course organizers have some way of managing communication with those who join their course).
- Disqus contributes to a sense of fragmentation - not really attached to P2PU. If you have chosen to handle discussion in a different way (as more than one course die), Disqus is just another channel that you have to monitor, and you don't have much control over how it works. Really not a fan of Disqus. At minimum, it should be possible to turn it off as a course setting, and/or on each page. Putting a custom message at the top of the "Discussion" tab explaining how the feature will or won't be used in the course would be a big help, as well. be able to turn it on and off
- I personally found having to login to Disqus separately each time a barrier to using it and assume others experienced it the same way.
- Announcements - no history of sent messages. archive? empty box you type into.. don't know where it's going, how it's formatted, what the "from" or "subject" field will look like.
- The fact that the #hashtag field in "Settings" feeds into the subject line of "Announcements" is not obvious. What else does it do? We would prefer to have the course name (without a #, and with the ability to use spaces) in the subject line -- or, ideally, just generic control over the subject line. Agreed: 20 characters makes for a very short subject line, and not being able to use spaces is tricky.
- Announcements should have a checkbox: "Auto-send to new students when they enroll." Without a feature like that, we have a tricky situation: we want to greet people early, but this means that people who enroll later miss the greeting.
- When people sign up after announcements - how do we contact them
- Might require a level of investment that might not be possible.
- When people sign up - way for them to get automatic message
- Email addresses are the only way that makes sense -- so how to get them as course facilitators while abiding by privacy policy, etc. - as new students sign up as well.
- Losing people with each additional communication tool
- When reviewing the People page as facilitator, the main piece of information I seek is the username - not the photo, "make organizer" or "remove user" buttons. Would also greatly appreciate a total enrolment figure - have calculated this manually many times.
- Not quite clear what it means to "Follow" someone or to be "Followed".
- An easy/obvious link to P2PU badges would be ideal - felt odd to add a manual html link directing students to our similarly branded badge. Also felt odd logging in a second time to the badges site as it looks and feels the same.
- Confused by non-English on the Settings page - Gearchiveerd, Gesloten? Also not sure what "rolling term" means in this context - perhaps some text to clarify? Same with most metadata fields- perhaps a brief explanation of what these terms mean and how the data will be used.
- Text editing suggestions:
- Didn't realize for a while that moving text around while editing text wouldn't automatically update the footnote order - so ended up with wrong citations attached to text during course development. Perhaps a note to users to this effect.
- An edit button at the top as well as bottom of each page would be greatly appreciated, for work on longer pages requring extensive edits.
- If the "Start Course" button were visible in the first screen it would not be necessary to add a sentence explaining to people where to click to sign up for the course.
- titles in the course boxes get cut off -- would be nice if it didn't!
- participant names - it would be good to have a list of the course participants. we had to ask dirk for this. we had the learners' icons under our 'course learners', but a list would be much easier.
- There's 4 pieces of info about a student: icon, person's name, "remove person," and "make organizer" -- the NAME is the important one, but it's not there -- only the other 3.
- even a list of the hashtags/username would be helpful
- username associated with emailsl
- p2pu doesn't work with older versions explorer (dirk knows)
Other issues
- We're also wrestling with how to handle our dual nature as an ongoing concern, vs. a single iteration of the course (and, soon, vs. a self-paced, unfacilitated version). In some ways, we want to present ourselves as a "timeless" thing, and in other ways, as something that is "starting next Tuesday, and running through mid-June." There are a number of aspects to this: public web presence, private/coordination pages and documents, enrollment lists. And, how/where do we keep pages that may still be useful to the students who finished last month but are still wrapping up, even as we present fresh pages to new students? (Pete F/WikiSOO)
- Collaborative platform to create a course
- P2PU has a specific platform in how they want us to work
- Takes a lot of effort for course organizers
- Interface doesnt make it clear what's going to happen with future tools
- Course support toolkit or resource - one document where everyone lists what tools they use - facilitation support
Leftover action items from before first SOO cycle
- Options for visible markers:
- Use About tab for desc; html for images/logos
- Change dimension limits of image so branding can be added to sliver on bottom of image
- Have lists show up in course page
- Link back to SOO on find page
- Featured lists on SOO landing page
- Badges system by March? - plan badges but not to have them in March (timeline March 14 - deadline by DML)