MobiMOOC

Have registered for the ‘massive open online course’(MOOC) on mlearning facilitated by a host of mlearning practitionerswith several participants from NZ and other places I have met/worked with.

Have been lurking at the moment due to work being rather busy. The course is hosted on wikispaces and communicates through google groups. Over the last week, there has been a large number of emails as course members introduce themselves to each other.

At present, things have settled down somewhat as focus returns to the main event, with week one facilitated by Inge de Waard. There was an elluminate session to kick things off. This ran 5am here in NZ and one Australian participant has already emailed a request for a more workable time for us in the antipodes!  The session had a good overview of mlearning (now on slideshare) with two examples from Inge’s Institute of Tropical Medicine’s work with health workers in Peru and a professional development portal for physicians.

Of interest is that the course encourages everyone to participate and offers examples of levels for participation. A good idea due to the number of people involved and individuals seeking to meet different objectives from being part of the course.


MOOCs are really an interesting concept and this is the second one I have 'participated' in. The first one on Connectivism stretched my understanding of how to deploy a variety of elearning tools, towards providing learning opportunities. In the main, both this and the previous course, requires intermediate levels of digital literacy as participants have to be able to navigate through a series of wikis, email or discussion forums and archive for themselves, the learning they glean through the course content and interaction with other course members. The real important skill is to be able to sieve through the large amount of information, work out the important bits to save, archive these somewhere for later retrieval (like on this blog) and then to be able to remember you have archived the items when you need the information!  So far, not many 'gems' as yet as the course is still in it's beginning stages. However, I never discount opportunites to learn serendipitous offerings as everyone has different approaches and come to innovative solutions to solve their individual requirements. So I am looking forward to further learning as the course proceeds.