This is by no means a rant or a war. I have no interest in arguing count pointercount. That being said, many of us are able to come to some manner of agreement about the sorts of education and educational contexts that are best for students. There is give and take.
If we were to prioritize our decision making for courses, where would we place our priorities? Given my druthers I prefer to be in the room with my students. Class size–particularly at the university level–has a tiered influence. Assuming the best about facilities, each professor has a critical mass that influences their teaching. What are yours? Consider how you would teach a class of five students, 15 students, 35 students, and then…what is your magic number?
Students may choose to make certain sacrifices in order to accomplish necessary goals–have we all skipped a night or two of sleep in order to experience something wonderful or to finish a project for work, school, or play? We have attended conference call meetings instead of meeting in person so we could get important information from a meeting or in order to “attend” while staying home with a sick spouse or child. Understanding that every utterance on that call would require a process of interrupting, waiting until you had the floor, exerting patience with interruptions that made your comments emanating from the speaker on the table unintelligible…such is life.
For some time, I have been populating (slowly) my Moodle site with course ideas and gradually adding content. Why, you ask? I thought that I may take a shake at this whole MOOC thing. Take a few weeks and get my feet wet facilitating a MASSIVE OPEN ONLINE COURSE. I am willing to give it a shot and have been just a bit too busy to finish even a short course. Aside from the time issue, I am motivated to keep the quality at a reasonably high level. Such is life.
I have decided to abandon the idea of developing anything MASSIVE. It is not the type of course I would enjoy taking and it is not the kind of interaction with students that I would enjoy having. I am interested in developing the
SMALL
PERSONALIZED
ONLINE
COLLABORATIVE
COURSE
I’m Dr. SPOCC, I’m here to rock, ya’ll. More to follow.
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