#edcmooc and the Digital Artefact (and beginning to debrief on the MOOC)

This is where we’ll talk a bit about the Digital Artefact assignment for the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC.  Besides discussing the process for handing in your artifact/artefact that’s due by Wednesday and which will kick off an assessment opportunity– that is, a chance for you to give comments and feedback on our fellow Coursera students on their projects. You will want to do both of these things– that is, completing an artefact and assessing your peers– in order to get your E-learning and Digital Cultures certificate.

First off, this is due at midnight on Wednesday February 27 England time! That’s more like 4 am our time, but you get the idea.  Submit a link from the Coursera web site under “final assessment” and the item labeled “submit and mark assignments.” Essentially, follow the directions: you have to “Go to assignment” and submit a link to you artefact.

You will need to do your assessment no later than midnight on March 3! The web site says that we’ll each be doing three assessments and we can do more if we want.  Be sure to meet that deadline though because if you don’t, you might not be able to get a certificate of completion for the MOOC.

What exactly are these digital artifacts/artefacts supposed to look like? Well, that’s been left pretty vague.  They have some suggestions under the tag “What you need to do” including making suggestions on what sorts of tools to use and some topics. These are not supposed to be very big! The assignment says a “maximum word count of 800 words” and if you are doing some kind of audio or video, it should last less than 5 minutes.  Here’s a link to my digital artefact; I’ll be curious to hear what you think of it.

One thing that I hope we’re able to do on this site this week is to talk a bit about how we interpreted these assignment requirements because from my point of view, this is one if the inherent weaknesses of trying to assign something this open-ended in a giant online “class” like this.

Starting Thursday, February 28 (and do start this then so we can talk about it before break!) you need to get started with your assessment of at least three other projects. I am assuming that the way this will work is we will all log back into the Coursera page and we’ll automatically be assigned some artifacts to review.  “How to give feedback” describes the process for what we’re supposed to do.  My hope is that we’ll be able to talk about this in the second half of this week, but from my way of thinking about these things, this is likely to be the second inherent weakness for a MOOC like this. But we’ll see how it turns out.

Okay, questions?