BACKGROUND
One of the objectives from my previous PDR meeting was to complete a MOOC course on-line and to write a piece of article to reflect my learning experience. The course I have decided to join was "Designing E-learning for Health" led by The University of Nottingham’s Health E-Learning and Media team (HELM) on FutureLearn. It's a 5 weeks course with the aim of helping learners to design and develop their own health care related e-learning objects with the tools and methods introduced by the HELM team. I have to confess that this is not the first time I sign up the course. My first enrolment was back in 2016 when the course was launched for the first time and FutureLearn was still at it's early stage. I decided on the topic simply based on the fact that a) it's medical/health subject related and b) it involved E-Learning. Had I have more options to choose from, I probably wouldn't have chosen the topic unless I had a real life project I can related to, which will definitely help me to gain more from the topic. Nevertheless, I decided to sign myself up once again this year just to refresh myself on the whole experience and to document some of the features and my general feelings in details.
HOW IT WORKS
Welcome Email
After signing up the course for the first time, A welcome email from FutureLearn was sent to me immediately with the following information:
- A welcome message with a link to the course info page which I think is very thoughtful to be included in the email.
- A pre-course survey link that can potentially help the organisers know a little bit more about their learners. I had a quick look at the questions and they seemed fairly generic to me mainly focusing on FutureLearn platform rather than the course itself. Although not necessarily help to customise the course down to personal level, it provides an opportunity for the platform to gain some insights about the learner themselves. Something worth considering for our distance learning courses in PGT programmes.
- A Review your profile link that brings the learners directly to their profile page where you get to update your personal profile page with an Avatar and a brief introduction. It helps learners to recognise each other and seems to be a common feature nowadays in every social platforms. This is definitely something I'd like to welcome in our current Learning environment where social elements are not at it's strongest. Although customising profile image is available on Blackboard, it's not as straight forward as provided here on FutureLearn nor any other social platforms.
- A group of social media icons allows you to share the course on major social media platforms so that your friends, co-workers may join the course as well. Again, social media is everywhere nowadays and it seems to be a good practice to have it on your pages, makes it feel modern and connected to the outside world.
Course Welcome Page
One of the problems with distance learning is that learners may feel disconnected and remote when they sign up a new course. I guess it's important to make them feel welcoming and give them something to start with before the course actually start. As mentioned earlier, a link that takes you straight to the course info page can be found in the welcome email. If the course hasn't started yet, you will be taken to a course welcome page where the following information are presented.
- Add to Calendar - allows you to add the course to your outlook or any other online calendars, a good way to remind the course start date to the users.
- Personal Goal - a web form that allows learners to submit personal goals and objectives to be tracked back in the future of the course.
- Introduce yourself - a pre-course forum that allows early joiners to start conversions within the course discussion forum.
- Start exploring - some links from around the web to help learners get started on the platform.
- Meet the educator - brief intro of the academics with links to the detailed personal profile page.
- What next? - another set of social icons that allows you to share the course on social medias.
Course Structure
The course is organised into 5 weeks with around 2-3 major activities in each week. Each major activity is then further divided into many mini topics and the ideas are introduced in the form of videos, audios and articles etc. Discussion points are included within each mini topic so that Learners can discuss what they've learned. Interactive quizzes are also built into many of the activities so that learner can test their knowledge with helpful responses and the opportunity to try again if an answer was wrong.
In my opinion, the course is very well structured with clear aim and objectives set for each topic. The videos are all very well made with some of the nice features included:
- text transcript (available both online and offline)
- standard and HD button allow user to adjust the quality based on their bandwidth
- subtitles included
The most challenging part would be the discussion points where they tend to through some of the very challenging questions to learners which really made them think deeply not just technically but pedagogically, to test and build your understanding. To me, this is the most time consuming bit but also probably the most interesting bit.
Showing the progress
One thing I find really helpful are the visual clues from the UI that indicate the progress you are at within the course. According to FutureLearn
One way to enhance learning is to make the process visible, so that you know what is coming next, where you are in the course and how far you have come.
And that is exactly what FutureLearn has done through out their entire user interface:
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The To Do tab gives learners an overview of the course, showing the progress within the week, the activities for each week, and keeping a record of what you’ve completed.
To do progress indicator -
There is a switch at the end of each step that allows learners to mark it as complete. This updates the ‘To do’ list, but leaving the switch off does not prevent you from moving on to the next step. If you’re not sure, you can leave it and come back to it later.
Mark as complete -
The progress tab shows you an overall completion percentage.
Overall completion percentage
The Discussions
Another area that worth mentioning would be the use of the discussion forum. According to FutureLearn
We learn best when we share and debate ideas with fellow learners, to understand their different experiences and perspectives and to fill the gaps in our own knowledge.
Unlike other learning platforms where discussions are happening within discussion forums on a separate page, FutureLearn discussions are happening alongside the content which makes it feel more like comments. As a beginner, I can start by reading what other people have to say about the topic, and then join in when I am ready. If one happened to have a widescreen monitor, you can even display the comments on the side of the content, make it easier to read through the content while scrolling down the comments without leaving the page.
Following other learner is another great feature that's available in the discussion forum. For example, if I particularly like a comment, I can choose to follow its author so that I can easily find the people and comments that are of the most interest to me. Everything are then stored in the activity tab where I am able to track my own activities as well as the people I've followed. I think this is a great way to acknowledge good contributions and promote people who offer helpful advice, and to develop your own reputation.
MY THOUGHTS
The community
I guess one of the beauty with MOOC is the ability to draw huge numbers of learners with various background and experiences to create a vibrant community that allows learners to make immediate use of their newly acquired skills by sharing their knowledge with their peers. Through out the course, I have seen educators, instructional designers, e-learning managers, medical professionals from different side of the world, various fields with great experiences and knowledge in E-learning sharing their thoughts and ideas on different aspects. This to me is the most valuable thing for joining a course like this is that I can learn a lot from these people.
The challenge
Time, time, time; although it was suggested in the course overview that learners shouldn't spend more than 3 hours per week to complete the course. It was okay if I only focusing on the core content and not the discussion posts. However, in reality, there were in average 200 posts in each mini topic in week 1 alone. I tried my best to read them through as quick as possible and shared my opinions on some, still the time I spent had far exceeded the suggested 3 hours/week. However, I have to admit this to a certain extent is due to my language ability and I may be slow in reading and writing. Anyways, it was a great challenge for me to follow up the course while juggling between work and family.
Another aspect that I hadn't thought about before signing up the course but felt slightly regretted that I should have done was to bring an ongoing or potential project along to the course. There was a stage when we were asked to create storyboard based on the framework we've been introduced in previous week. I can definitely see the benefit of having a real project to associate with so I can apply what I've learnt into a real case scenario.
Overall, this is a great experience and I felt I have gained a lot from joining a course like this. I will defnitely look further on FutureLearn and maybe some other MOOC providers to see if there are anything interesting to follow.