Frances Bell has started a Google Doc collecting historical information about cMOOCs. I’m reposting my contributions to the doc (about my own cMOOCs) here on opencontent.org so I can find them again in the future if the Google Doc ever goes away.
Year: 2007
Where: USU, INST 7150, Intro to Open Education
Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education
Archive.org Link
Course Design:
- Students included both formal students earning credit at USU and students from around the world participating for free
- Students who completed the course and requested a Certificate of Completion received a certificate
- Course syllabus was presented in a wiki which students could (and did) edit
- Readings and videos were on the public web
- Each student maintained a blog where their writing and assignments were posted publicly
- A course OPML file was used to aggregate all student writing for easy reading in RSS Readers
- The course wiki included a master list of participants, including names, institution (if any), email address, and blog address
- Clusters of students created affinity-based sub-groups with mailing lists, etc.
Year: 2009
Where: BYU, IPT 692R, Intro to Open Education
Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education
Archive.org Link
Course Design:
- Students included both formal students earning credit at BYU and students from around the world participating for free
- Course was designed as a massively multiplayer online game
- Students had to choose a Character Class to play during the term. Each class specialized in a different area of knowledge (IP and licensing, business models, history and philosophy, etc.) and had a separate Skills Tree (syllabus)
- Assignments were structured as quests. The first quests could be completed by individuals, but later quests required a range of skills that required different character classes to collaborate.
- Quests resulted in Experience Points, which translated into player Levels. Levels translated into final grades.
- An attempt was made to encourage the creation of Guilds (sub-groups of players) that would compete against each other (e.g., on XP earned), but this failed.
- Readings and videos were on the public web
Year: 2012
Where: BYU, IPT 692R, Intro to Openness in Education
Audience: Those interested in learning more about Open Education
Archive.org Link
Course Design:
- Students included both formal students earning credit at BYU and students from around the world participating for free
- Mozilla Open Badges were awarded to students who completed course challenges
- Badges translated into grades
- Readings and videos were on the public web
- Each student maintained a blog where their writing and assignments were posted publicly
- FeedWordpress was used to centrally aggregate all student writing to an Updates section of the site