Alessandro blogged tonight about the same frustration many of us (myself included) are feeling with regard to the Intro to Open Ed course. Alessandro’s frustrated that I haven’t been providing as much feedback as might be desired. I have to agree. With about 60 students following the course, I could easily spend all day every day responding to what you are all writing and still not keep up. There is really amazing thinking and writing happening “out there,” and I love reading it and engaging with it. As you may guess, though, I’m making sure to give feedback and additional prompts to the students who are registered for credit first, and then reading as much of the rest of your work when I can, and commenting when possible.
One thing I knew coming into this was that if I opened the course for broad participation, I couldn’t possibly scale to providing in depth feedback to all 60 of you every week. This is part of why I encourage you to read and comment on each other’s work. And I’m happy to report that this is beginning to happen. However, as Stian says in a comment on Alessandro’s post,
I think our blog posts are less interesting because [snip] most of it tends just to be very similar looking “summaries of main points”.
So, as a recommendation, when you write about what we’re reading for the week, please do put some of yourself in the response. Include some of your original thoughts. Read and link to some of your classmates’ posts. As Stian suggests, the more thoughtful and interesting your post is, the more likely you are to get a discussion started.
For the first few weeks of the class I tried to include highlights of what you were writing on my blog. I then switched over to leaving comments directly on people’s sites. I’m now hearing that perhaps people liked having the highlights and my commentary all in one spot (here on this blog). I’d appreciate your thoughts in the comments section of this post. I’d be happy to go back to doing it that way. Also, I’ve heard some people asking for some synchronous chatting. Let me know your thoughts about this in the comments, too.
I love what you’re doing and what you’re writing; I’m sorry I’m not commenting on all of it. Please keep up the good work, and please support each other! I don’t want this to be a failed experiment. So please send me your ideas for how we can make the course work better, especially for those who are “following” and not necessarily signed up for credit.