On November 14th the course Humanizing Online Instruction: #HumanMOOC will begin again. I’m delighted to be working with Maha Al-Freih, Patrice Torcivia Prusko, and Matt Crosslin again on the course. This time we will be utilizing a new social learning discussion and curation tool called YellowDig and hope to gain some valuable insights into the effectiveness of this tool for encourage social collaboration around content. We will again utilize the Canvas open network for the course as well as FlipGrid and social media tools (blogs, twitter, live YouTube events).
In case you are new to the HumanMOOC, the course is focused on how to use the Community of Inquiry framework as a model for online teaching and learning and how infusing digital learning environments with presence (teaching and social) can help to remove the transactional distance between instructor and students & students and each other. The course is also aligned with many of the Penn State pedagogical competencies for online teaching success and therefore becomes a competency based MOOC. The course offers badges to successful learners where badges are offered each week based upon demonstrating mastery related to instructor presence, social presence, and cognitive presence. Finally, learners can earn the CoI badge if they have earned all three of the previous badges. This makes this a course with stackable badges or micro-credentials.
It is important to note that none of the facilitators are paid for their work on the course. It was built during my PhD program as a product of an advanced instructional design course and the facilitators have joined in co-teaching this course in order to conduct research, write journal articles, share findings at conferences, and most importantly collaborate with the learning community. Thus far 4 academic papers and 1 doctoral dissertation have resulted from the course and this version of the course is no different. The research being conducted in the course has been approved by the institutional review board (IRB) at George Mason University and Maha Al-Freih is collecting data for her dissertation on self-regulated learning and MOOCs. We encourage you to come and learn with and from each other in the course but also to take part in the research study.
If you would like to join the course, you can register for free at https://www.canvas.net/browse/canvasnet/courses/humanizing-online-instruction-2