Today was day one for “E-Learning and Digital Cultures,” the University of Edinburgh course offered as a MOOC via Coursera. I have decided to participate in the course and blog about my experiences here on The Wheel. From what I can tell, I will be watching a series of films and reading at least one article every week, and I am expected to demonstrate my engagement with the materials in two of five ways:

Contribute to the asynchronous, threaded discussion form Blog Join a synchronous video discussion with my peers Post a visual representation to a social media network Tweet

Note that only one of those five options requires me to actually operate within the course site. The rest of the communications are elsewhere on the web. To keep track of everyone, they ask that we tag all images, blogs, and tweets with #edcmooc. We are also invited to submit our blogs to EDC MOOC News.

There has been quite a bit of interaction happening between my peers already—there’s a Facebook group with 4,054 members, a Google+ group with 1,357 members, and a lively twitter feed. As seen in the below screenshot, they have embedded the Twitter feed onto the course website, so even when I am within the confines of the “course,” I am aware of the wider Internet community.

I was also intrigued to learn that, in the second week of the class, we will be joined by students who are taking a physical e-learning course at the University of Edinburgh.

In addition to engaging with my peers and reading/watching the materials, I will be completing a final assignment, which appears to be the only “graded” part of the course. The instructions are fairly vague—we are to create a “digital artifact” that relates to the course concepts and post it somewhere on the web (they recommend about 800 words if it is a textual artifact and about 5 minutes if it is a video artifact). We will paste a link to the artifact within the course and receive feedback from peers.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

-Mary