I’ve bought a WordPress site and have so far designed it around Commons in a Box, however, I’m finding problems witht his so will change it and base it around the MesoColumn theme, as this works well on mobile and I am familiar with the design through building the North West OER site. What design aspects do I need?

Memebership

Invitations

Forums

The course is free but I need to control access to the group and build membership, this is so members have a secure space to develop groups and develop communities around the materials. I also need ways of promoting the course and invites.

What is it about Moocs that creates fear, is it the lack of understanding, the rationale to give things away for free, the unknown elements of open access, the fear that our flwas will be screened to the public, that we will be in some way responsible to the public. Shouldn’t we be responsible to the public and in some way developing social engagement to better not only our students but the public well being, how can we work together and how does IP become an issue?

I need to devise different ways to create extended communities between campus and open access to develop courses, maybe not using the word Mooc but as is suggested extended engagement. How can these courses help to strengthen our public profile and access to those in the local area, for support and development, to increase the profile of the university and get students and members of the public to work and contribute to each other in the development of teaching and learning?

Things are moving well, today I created my own Mooc site. My research will change slightly and part of this will be the ability to develop my own courses, rather than rely on others. To build the site took about a day, and a lot of work is still needed.

This night change the focus and the use if resources and types of Mooc.

I need to develop a community and connect my classes to it to see how they work together.

What might also be interesting is the quality if the materials and how they are used.

I want to explore the digital learning spaces but how do I access them, do I link into them or create them? How are they observed and how to record and analyse the data?

I need a methodology for this, and maybe a support team. It’s looking more and more like action research.

I am now hosting a WordPress site for my Mooc. It’s great, I can organise the theme and pick widgets to use, now for the design. What are the main things I need to cover? Am I using this to connect my class or connect others? If I get the Manchester course together quickly then I could publish the last few weeks on there using the resources I already have. I could then get a small group from Manchester to test this.

I need to develop it quickly and see what I can do with it next term.

This pushes the research in a new direction, the question of who owns knowledge, but also the quality of it. If I can set up a Mooc, then anyone can. What’s to say that the quality is always there, I know that producing my own resources there are things I forget to put in, or there isn’t enough time, or the students don’t use all the resources. This means the context might change?

This takes me to some of my early research, about putting research out there and seeing what comes back. If I develop the Manchester course and provide a number of links I can see how people engage with the materials and learn from those inside and outside of class. This is what I originally wanted to do, but this has changed a little. It might be worth putting the term into two sections, to develop these ideas more to see how they learn internally and externally?

I now need to develop the Mooc, I need to get the links int here to the resources, and links for discussion and debate on each resource, including a quiz.

I’ll need to use docs, Twitter, Facebook, Disqus and some sort of learning management.