Week 01: Orientation

Welcome to Change MOOC!

Welcome to Change - a Massive Open Online Course.

This email is a short introduction to the course facilitators and to what you can expect next week.

The course schedule is here: http://bit.ly/rmQ6FE
Feel free to share this sign up link with colleagues: http://bit.ly/n8FNMx
Course tag: #change11

There are three of us facilitating this course: Stephen Downes (National Research Council, Canada), Dave Cormier (University of Prince Edward Island), and George Siemens (Athabasca University). We've collaborated on numerous online courses before and have continued to refine our pedagogical methods and our technical infrastructure. The format this year is different from what we've done in the past: we've invited a group of fascinating thinkers to share their expertise with us - one per week.

This course starts on September 19. This next week, however, will be an orientation week. We will provide our reflections and some information on how to get the most out of this course. You'll receive our "Five Steps to MOOC Bliss" in daily emails, starting Monday, Sept 12. These will offer our suggestions for dealing with the course format, how to make sense of the distributed format, and how to find your way around. Of course, this being a MOOC, you are free to participate as you like.

Looking forward to an outstanding learning experience over the next 35 weeks!

George, Dave, Stephen [Comment]

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Intro: Orientation Week

The first week of #change11 will serve to orient you to the course format and ways in which you can become involved in the course. This is a five day guide to open course bliss!

Monday: Personal Reflections
Tues: How to participate
Wed: Getting setup: blogs and gRSShopper
Thurs: Research projects in this open course
Fri: Your goals and expectations

To get started, here are a few resources:

Videos:
- What is a MOOC (Dave Cormier)
- Intro: George Siemens
- Intro: Dave Cormier
- Welcome to the Change MOOC, Stephen Downes
- MOOC Interview: Howard Rheingold and George Siemens
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Day 2: How to Participate

Yesterday, we shared our reflections on MOOCs. Today, we'll provide a bit of advice on how to participate in open online courses. There really isn't "one way" to do this - it's personal, contextual, and dependent on the time and interest you have in the topic.

Here are a few posts on how to participate:

Nine steps to participating in a MOOC, George Siemens

How much Time, from CCK08, by Stephen Downes

Self-Regulated Learning and Coping With MOOC Abundance, The MOOC Guide, Stephen Downes, et.al.

The MOOC Model for Digital Practice, Alexander McAuley, Bonnie Stewart, George Siemens and Dave Cormier [Comment]

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Privacy, Security and Research

The change.mooc.ca Course has a firm commitment to privacy. This document discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this website.

Please note that your contributions to the course on the website - links to feeds, posts, comments, and other content - will be stored on http://change.mooc.ca and will be publicly available for viewing by other participants, researchers, and the general public. Additionally, content related to the course you may have posted publicly on some other website will be publicly available to participants, researchers, and the general public, and links and references to that material may be posted on this site. [Comment]

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Set Up Your Social Web

Welcome to Day 3 of the Change MOOC orientation week. Today it's all about setting up your social web. Here's an introduction to the social web aspect of this online course.

In particular, once you are logged in, you should click on the Options link in the upper right hand corner of course pages. Clicking on this takes you to your options page, where you can manage your online presence in change.mooc.ca. This page lets you manage your social network in the course.

We would especially like to encourage you to add your blog or RSS feed. We will aggregate the posts you write over the year, and if you use the #change11 tag in the title, body or category of your post, we'll be able to link to it in the course newsletter and make it available in the content viewer. To submit your feed, click on the Add a New Feed link. This will take you to a form where you can add your feed information.

Visit and reload the the blog viewer page - we'll be approving and harvesting starting this evening. [Comment]

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What Else is Happening?

We encourage all participants in #change11 to create or manage their own course activities elsewhere on the web. If you set up an activity and send us email then we will:

- provide a description and link in the 'Facilitators Posts' section of the course newsletter
- add your activities to the Web-based Activities page.

Some activities have already been started - a Facebook group, a teleconference schedule, more. Visit the page to see these, and more, listed. You can start participating any time. [Comment]

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Researching #Change11

As a participant in #change11, it is important for you to be aware of the privacy and security details relating to your involvement. The course privacy notice can be found here.

There are numerous research activities planned for #change11. If you wish to follow, or engage in, those projects, please join this google group for mooc research. When joining, please provide a short statement of your interest so we know who is interested and who is a spammer :).

During #change11, you will receive invitations to join research projects focused on specific themes or topics. This may include surveys, requests to join pilot groups, interviews, focus groups, or other activities. All of these are optional and you are free to discontinue any research projects that you have joined at any time. Where interviews or focus groups are conducted, researchers should have received ethics board approval from their university. Your comments on the open web - namely blogs, twitter, or sites that anyone can access without a password - may be reviewed by researchers. While ethics review boards are not clear on open web research, the general view seems to be that research on blogs/twitter/social media is similar to research using other public resources like newspapers.

Researchers are asked to adhere to guidelines around open online content. Our view is that if content and interactions are open and online (no password required), then ethics board approval is not required for research. This policy is similar to what major research universities have adopted. See, for example, University of Texas' statement on human subject research and the open web (thanks to George Veletsianos for the link). Where content online is used, we ask that researchers take steps to preserve anonymity of individuals unless they receive waivers from individuals themselves.

Do you have any questions with regard to research activities in #change11? If so, please contact gsiemens@gmail.com [Comment]

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Setting goals and expectations

Now that you've had a chance to get a bit of an overview of how open online courses are run, the technical components (grsshopper), you might find it helpful to think about what *you* want to get out of this course. What will make it a successful experience?

Take a few moments and reflect on your goals. Do you have something tangible in mind? Perhaps you're here to create a personal network and connect with colleagues. Or perhaps your goal is to spend time working with different technologies that you've heard about, but haven't had time to experiment with. Or perhaps you're here to contribute your knowledge of emerging technologies with colleagues. Regardless of what you've set for goals for #change11, and how firmly or clearly you've defined your goals, consider sharing them via a blog post or tumblr post. You can set up a free blog through sites like edublogs or tumblr. Add your blog to the course blog feed here and, if you use the #change11 tag in your post, it will be aggregated into the Daily.

Another important criteria for enjoying an open course, from our experience, relates to expectations. This is an open online course. That means you'll receive way more information that you can possibly read or make sense of. Don't expect to consume it all. If it's important, you'll come across it again. In terms of technology - we've run these courses for several years and have made significant progress in terms of format and delivery. However, technology is technology. Things go wrong. Expect it. Failure is part of experimentation. You will likely also find that it takes persistence, time, and effort to connect with others. That absolutely brilliant blog post you wrote may not receive the quality of feedback that you expect.

We encourage you to take the mindset that this course is a journey. We have plans and an itinerary. But things will go wrong. Plans will change. Not every meal will be stellar. Not every site can be explored to the depth that you desire. Sometimes your fellow travellers will get on your nerves. However, at the end of the journey, we *expect* that we'll have made good friends, great memories, and will have been enriched by the journey.
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Live Meeting Facility

We have set up our online conferencing environment, an open source application called Big Blue Button, and integrated it into gRSShopper. This means that anyone who has a #change11 userid and who is logged in can go to the Live Meetings page and create their own meeting.

This is a greate opportunity to try out the conferencing environment before the scheduled session. When you go to the Live Meetings page you will see a list of meetings in progress. Enter any of them and test your audio and video. The rooms are still in the experimental stage, so we would appreciate your feedback. [Comment]

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Week 2: Zoraini Wati Abas on Mobile Learning at Open University Malaysia

Welcome to week 2, the first week of actual course content in #change11. This week will see us set out our regular course format, the approach we will be using for the rest of the year.

We begin by introducing this week's guest, Zoraini Wati Abas, who will be talking about Mobile Learning at Open University Malaysia. As you can see in the newsletter today, he has shared an overview of his topic, his blog, and three articles. We also have a live event scheduled for Wednesday in our new conferencing environment.

All readings, video and other resources for this week are available on the Week 2 course page. You'll find the link to this page on the left hand side of most course pages. As new resources related to the topic are added through the week, they will be listed on this page. #week2 [Comment]

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