As my handle suggests, I consider myself to be an eternal student, a life long student of learning if you will. Now that I have retired from a pressurised day job I’m in a position where I can focus on my own learning and continuous professional development in the hope of passing it along to my students. That’s the plan anyway!
I recently discovered MOOCs through the Coursera platform. Of course, I knew what MOOCs were but never had the time to research or take anyway. That has now changed and guess what, I’m addicted!
It all started back in Spring of this year when I was working on my application to study Digital Education online at the University of Edinburgh and I came across a 3 week MOOC offered by UoE entitled Digital Footprint. Well, I’m no social media teccie, I get by, but thought it would be good to understand a little more about privacy and security online. Little did I know that the Digital Footprint MOOC was the door opener that I raced through head first in my discovery of other MOOCs whose titles attracted me (note to self: never give up the search for interesting titles to attract your audience).
Next up was Learning how to learn: powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects led by Barb Oakley with regular inputs by Terry Sejnowski. Since I would soon be a student once more it made sense that I would do some prep in advance. This MOOC was 4 weeks in length and I looked forward each week to new content including ‘chunking’ (never heard of it before) and tools to deal with procrastination (Pomodoro Technique). Oh the joy of learning new interesting stuff and passing the quizzes with ease! What would I learn next???
As I was becoming a big fan of Barb Oakley (by now following her on Twitter) I saw that she had another 4 week MOOC called Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential and it even had it’s own Twitter account to follow for even more interesting content – this just gets better and better, I thought to myself!
On a related note, this whole Twitter business was getting messy. I had an account for a number of years that I used to follow news, charities and the usual personal stuff. Now adding in the more academic content was becoming unmanageable so going back to the content from ‘Digital Footprint’ I decided I needed separate Twitter accounts, one personal and one academic to mitigate the confusion I was causing myself!
This world of MOOCs just kept expanding. Coursera turns out to be one of a number of platforms where MOOCs are offered so fast forward to class-central.com, a whole new discovery for another day.
The key thing I learned from these early MOOCs is that to get the best out of them, don’t rush, take only one at a time and most of all, enjoy them!
More to follow next time.
Sandra Flynn 