Interesting insight into what it’s like to work on a MOOC (certainly not ‘time-saving’ – which is one of the criteria lots of people wanted from the use of tech when I try and persuade them… have to be other reasons):
But what did instructors and students think?
Siân Bayne, a senior lecturer, and Jeremy Knox, a PhD student, both in the University of Edinburgh’s School of Education, were instructors on the university’s E-learning and Digital Cultures Mooc.
From August 2012 until the course went live in January, Knox estimates he was spending about eight hours a week on Mooc-related activity. During the five weeks of the course itself, this figure doubled, he says.
“Populating the platform itself was quite time-consuming, but we thought that once it was up and running, it would kind of run itself. That’s the impression we got from Coursera – just wind it up and watch it go. However, we found that we were spending a lot of time monitoring the course while it was going.”
In contrast to the set-up of many programmes offered via Coursera, the developers of Edinburgh’s e-learning course opted against having the content driven by audiovisual footage of lectures delivered to camera, choosing instead to curate open-source online content, including YouTube footage and academic papers.
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